The footpath way : an anthology for walkers

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THE FOOTPATH WAY

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The Footpath Way

AN ANTHOLOGY FOB WALKERS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Hilaire Belloc

LONDON

Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd.

1911

All Rights Reserved

,628054

3o. (. •5"6

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION

H. Belloc

I

WALKING AN ANTIDOTE TO CITY POISON .

Sidney Smith

17

ON GOING A JOURNEY ....

William Hazlitt

19

THE BISHOP OF SALISBURY'S HORSE .

Izaak Walton

37

A STROLLING PEDLAR ....

Sir Walter Scott

39

A STOUT PEDESTRIAN ....

Sir Walter Scott

42

LAKE SCENERY ..... 48

William Wordsworth

WALKING, AND THE WILD.

H. D. Thoreau

52

A YOUNG TRAMP

Charles Dickens

104

DE QUINCEY LEADS THE SIMPLE LIFE

Thomas de Quincey

III

A RESOLUTION . . .

George Borrow

116

THE SNOWDON RANGER ....

George Borrow
V

131

CONTENTS

PAGE

SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD . . . I43

IValt Whitman

WALKING TOURS . . . . '159

R. L. Stevenson

SYLVANUS URBAN DISCOVERS A GOOD BREW 1 73

Gentleman' s Magazine

MINCHMOOR 175

Dr John Brown

IN PRAISE OF WALKING . . . • IQI

Leslie Stephen

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD . . 22 1

John Burroughs

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The thanks of the publishers are due to :
Messrs Chatto & Windus, Messrs Duckworth,
and Messrs Houghton Miflin of Boston, U.S.A.,
for permission to include R. L. Stevenson's
Walking Tours ; Sir Leslie Stephen's In Praise
of Walking ; and Mr John Burroughs' The
Exhilarations of the Road, from " Winter Sun-
shine"; also to Mr A. H. Bullen for the extract
from The Gentleman's Magazine.

Introduction

So long as man does not bother about
what he is or whence he came or
whither he is goings the whole thing
seems as simple as the verb "to be " ; and you
may say that the moment he does begin think-
ing about what he is (which is more than think-
ing that he is) and whence he came and whither
he is going, he gets on to a lot of roads that
lead nowhere, and that spread like the fingers
of a hand or the sticks of a fan ; so that if he
pursues two or more of them he soon gets
beyond his straddle, and if he pursues only
one he gets farther and farther from the rest
of all knowledge as he proceeds. You may
say that and it will be true. But there is one
kind of knowledge a man does get when he
thinks about what he is, whence he came and
whither he is going, which is this : that it is
the only important question he can ask him-
self.

Now the moment a man begins asking him-
self those questions (and all men begin at some

2 THE FOOTPATH WAY

time or another if you give them rope enough)
man finds himself a very puzzling fellow.
There was a school — it can hardly be called a
school of philosophy — and it is now as dead as
mutton, but anyhow there was a school which
explained the business in the very simple
method known to the learned as tautology —
that is, saying the same thing over and over
again. For just as the woman in Moliere was
dumb because she was affected with the quality
of dumbness, so man, according to this school,
did all the extraordinary things he does do
because he had developed in that way. They
took in a lot of people while they were alive
(I believe a few of the very old ones still sur-
vive), they took in nobody more than them-
selves ; but they have not taken in any of
the younger generation. We who come after
these scientists continue to ask ourselves the
old question, and if there is no finding of an
answer to it, so much the worse ; for asking it,
every instinct of our nature tells us, is the
proper curiosity of man.
"^ Of the great many things which man does
which he should not do or need not do, if he
were wholly explained by the verb i^ to be,"
you may count walking. Of course if you
build up a long series of guesses as to the steps
by which he learnt to walk, and call that an
explanation, there is no more to be said. It is

ON WALKING 3

as though I were to ask you why Mr Smith
went to Liverpool^ and you were to answer by
giving me a list of all the stations between
Euston and Lime Street, in their exact order.
At least that is what it would be like if your
guesses were accurate^ not only in their state-
ment, but also in their proportion, and also in
their order. It is millions to one that your
guesses are nothing of the kind. But even
granted by a miracle that you have got them
all quite right (which is more than the wildest
fanatic would grant to the dearest of his geo-
logians) it tells me nothing.

What on earth persuaded the animal to go
on like that ? Or was it nothing on earth but
something in heaven ?

Just watch a man walking, if he is a proper
man, and see the business of it : how he ex-
presses his pride, or his determination, or his
tenacity, or his curiosity, or perhaps his very
purpose in his stride ! Well, all that business
of walking that you are looking at is a piece
of extraordinarily skilful trick - acting, such
that were the animal not known to do it
you would swear he could never be trained
to it by any process, however lengthy, or
however minute, or however strict. This is
what happens when a man walks : first of
all he is in stable equilibrium, though the
arc of stability is minute. If he stands with

4 THE FOOTPATH WAY

his feet well apart, his centre of gravity (which
is about half way up him or a little more) may
oscillate within an arc of about five degrees on
either side of stability and tend to return to
rest. But if it oscillates beyond that five
degrees or so, the stability of his equilibrium
is lost, and down he comes. Men have been
known to sleep standing up without a support,
especially on military service, which is the
most fatiguing thing in the world ; but it is
extremely rare, and you may say of a man so
standing, even with his feet well spread, that
he is already doing a fine athletic feat.

But wait a moment : he desires to go, to pro-
ceed, to reach a distant point, and instead of
going on all fours, where equilibrium would
indeed be stable, what does he do.? He
deliberately lifts one of his supports off the
ground, and sends his equilibrium to the devil ;
at the same time he leans a little forward so as
to make himself fall, towards the object he
desires to attain. You do not know that he
does this, but that is because you are a man
and your ignorance of it is like the ignorance in
which so many really healthy people stand to
religion, or the ignorance of a child wh^ thinks
his family established for ever in comfort, wealth
and security. What you really do, man, when
you want to get to that distant place (and let
this be a parable of all adventure and of all

ON WALKING 5

desire) is to take an enormous risk^ the risk of
coming down bang and breaking something :
you lift one foot off the ground, and, as
though that were not enough, you deliber-
ately throw your centre of gravity forward so
that you begin to fall.

That is the first act of the comedy.

The second act is that you check your fall
by bringing the foot which you had swung
into the air down upon the ground again.

That you would say was enough of a bout.
Slide the other foot up, take a rest, get your
breath again and glory in your feat. But not a
bit of it ! The moment you have got that loose
foot of yours firm on the earth, you use the
impetus of your first tumble to begin another
one. You get your centre of gravity by the
momentum of your going well forward of the
foot that has found the ground, you lift the
other foot without a care, you let it swing
in the fashion of a pendulum, and you check
your second fall in the same manner as you
checked your first ; and even after that second
clever little success you do not bring your feet
both firmly to the ground to recover yourself
before the next venture : you go on with the
business, get your centre of gravity forward of
the foot that is now on the ground, swinging
the other beyond it like a pendulum, stopping
your third catastrophe, and so on ; and you

6 THE FOOTPATH WAY

have come to do all this so that you think
it the most natural thing in the world !

Not only do you manage to do it but you
can do it in a thousand ways, as a really
clever acrobat will astonish his audience not
only by walking on the tight-rope but by
eating his dinner on it. You can walk quickly
or slowly, or look over your shoulder as you
walk, or shoot fairly accurately as you walk ;
you can saunter, you can force your pace, you
can turn which way you will. You certainly
did not teach yourself to accomplish this
marvel, nor did your nurse. There was a
spirit within you that taught you and that
brought you out ; and as it is with walking,
so it is with speech, and so at last with
humour and with irony, and with affection,
and with the sense of colour and of form,
and even with honour, and at last with
prayer.

By all this you may see that man is very
remarkable, and this should make you humble,
not proud ; for you have been designed in
spite of yourself for some astonishing fate, of
which these mortal extravagances so accurately
seized and so well moulded to your being are
but the symbols.

Walking, like talking (which rhymes with it,
I am glad to say), being so natural a thing to
man, so varied and so unthought about, is

ON WALKING 7

necessarily not only among his chief occupa-
tions but among his most entertaining subjects
of commonplace and of exercise.

Thus to walk without an object is an intense
burden, as it is to talk without an object. To
walk because it is good for you warps the soul,
just as it warps the soul for a man to talk for
hire or because he thinks it his duty. On
the other hand, walking with an object brings
out all that there is in a man, just as talking
with an object does. And those who under-
stand the human body, when they confine
themselves to what they know and are there-
fore legitimately interesting, tell us this very
interesting thing which experience proves to
be true : that walking of every form of exercise
is the most general and the most complete,
and that while a man may be endangered by
riding a horse or by running or swimming,
or while a man may easily exaggerate any
violent movement, walking will always be to
his benefit — that is, of course, so long as he
does not warp his soul by the detestable habit
of walking for no object but exercise. For
it has been so arranged that the moment we
begin any minor and terrestrial thing as an
object in itself, or with merely the furtherance
of some other material thing, we hurt the
inward part of us that governs all. But
walk for glory or for adventure, or to see new

8 THE FOOTPATH WAY

sights, or to pay a bill or to escape the same,
and you will very soon find how consonant
is walking with your whole being. The chief
proof of this (and how many men have tried it,
and in how many books does not that truth
shine out!) is the way in which a man walking
becomes the cousin or the brother of every-
thing round.

If you will look back upon your life and
consider what landscapes remain fixed in your
memory, some perhaps you will discover to
have struck you at the end of long rides or
after you have been driven for hours, dragged
by an animal or a machine. But much the
most of these visions have come to you when
you were performing that little miracle with a
description of which I began this : and what is
more, the visions that you get when you are
walking, merge pleasantly into each other.
Some are greater, some lesser, and they make
a continuous whole. The great moments are
led up to and are fittingly framed.

There is no time or weather, in England at
least, in which a man walking does not feel
this cousinship with everything round. There
are weathers that are intolerable if^pu are
doing anything else but walking : if you are
crouching still against a storm or if you are
driving against it ; or if you are riding in ex-
treme cold ; or if you are running too quickly

ON WALKING 9

in extreme heat ; but it is not so with
walking. You may walk by night or by day,
in summer or in winter, in fair weather or
in foul, in calm or in a gale, and in every case
you are doing something native to yourself and
going the best way you could go. All men
have felt this.

Walking, also from this same natural quality
which it has, introduces particular sights to
you in their right proportion. A man gets
into his motor car, or more likely into some-
body else's, and covers a great many miles
in a very few hours. And what remains to
him at the end of it, when he looks closely
into the pictures of his mind, is a curious
and unsatisfactory thing : there are patches of
blurred nothingness like an uneasy sleep, one
or two intense pieces of impression, dis-
connected, violently vivid and mad, a red
cloak, a shining streak of water, and more
particularly a point of danger. In all that
ribbon of sights, each either much too lightly
or much too heavily impressed, he is lucky if
there is one great view which for one moment
he seized and retained from a height as he
whirled along. The whole record is like a
bit of dry point that has been done by a hand
not sure of itself upon a plate that trembled,
now jagged chiselling bit into the metal ; now
blurred or hardly impressed it at all : only in

10 THE FOOTPATH WAY

some rare moment of self-possession or of
comparative repose did the hand do what it
willed and transfer its power.

You may say that riding upon a horse one
has a better chance. That is true, but after
all one is busy riding. Look back upon the
very many times that you have ridden, and
though you will remember many things you
will not remember them in that calm and
perfect order in which they presented them-
selves to you when you were afoot. As for
a man running, if it be for any distance the
effort is so unnatural as to concentrate upon
himself all a man's powers, and he is almost
blind to exterior things. Men at the end
of such efforts are actually and physically
blind; they fall helpless.

Then there is the way of looking at the
world which rich men imagine they can
purchase with money when they build a great
house looking over some view — but it is not
in the same street with walking ! You see
the sight nine times out of ten when you are
ill attuned to it, when your blood is slow a?id
unmoved, and when the machine is not going.
When you are walking the machine is always
going, and every sense in you is doing what
it should with the right emphasis and in due
discipline to make a perfect record of all that
is about.

ON WALKING 11

Consider how a man walking approaches a
little town; he sees it a long way off upon a hill ;
he sees its unity, he has time to think about
it a great deal. Next it is hidden from him
by a wood, or it is screened by a roll of land.
He tops this and sees the little town again,
now much nearer, and he thinks more particu-
larly of its houses, of the way in which they
stand, and of what has passed in them. The
sky, especially if it has large white clouds in
it and is for the rest sunlit and blue, makes
something against which he can see the little
town, and gives it life. Then he is at the
outskirts, and he does not suddenly occupy it
with a clamour or a rush, nor does he merely
contemplate it, like a man from a window,
unmoving. He enters in. He passes, healthily
wearied, human doors and signs; he can note
all the names of the people and the trade at
which they work ; he has time to see their
faces. The square broadens before him, or
the market-place, and so very naturally and
rightly he comes to his inn, and he has ful-
filled one of the great ends of man.

Lord, how tempted one is here to make a
list of those monsters who are the enemies
of inns !

There is your monster who thinks of it as
a place to which a man does not walk but into
which he slinks to drink ; and there is your

12

THE FOOTPATH WAY

monster who thinks of it as a place to be reached
in a railway train and there to put on fine
clothes for dinner and to be waited upon by
Germans. There is your more amiable monster,
who says : " I hear there is a good inn at
Little Studley or Bampton Major. Let us go
there." He waits until he has begun to be
hungry, and he shoots there in an enormous
automobile. There is your still more amiable
monster, who in a hippo-mobile hippogriffically
tools into a town and throws the ribbons to
the person in gaiters with a straw in his
mouth, and feels (oh, men, my brothers ) that
he is doing something like someone in a book.
All these men, whether they frankly hate or
whether they pretend to love, are the enemies
of inns, and the enemies of inns are accursed
before their Creator and their kind.

There are some things which are a consola-
tion for Eden and which clearly prove to the
heavily-burdened race of Adam that it has
retained a memory of diviner things. We
have all of us done evil. We have permitted
the modern cities to grow up, and we hay^
told such lies that now we are accursed with
newspapers. And we have so loved-wealth
that we are all in debt, and that the poor are
a burden to us and the rich are an offence.
But we ought to keep up our hearts and not
to despair, because v/e can still all of us pray

ON WALKING 13

when there is an absolute necessity to do
soj and we have wormed out the way of
building up that splendid thing which all
over Christendom men know under many
names and which is called in England an

INN.

I have sometimes wondered when I sat in one
of these places, remaking my soul, whether the
inn would perish out of Europe. I am con-
vinced the terror was but the terror which we
always feel for whatever is exceedingly beloved.

There is an inn in the town of Piacenza into
which I once walked while I was still full of
immortality, and there I found such good
companions and so much marble, rooms so
large and empty and so old, and cooking so
excellent, that I made certain it would survive
even that immortality which, I say, was all
around. But no ! I came there eight years
later, having by that time heard the noise
of the Subterranean River and being well
conscious of mortality. I came to it as to
a friend, and the beastly thing had changed !
In place of the grand stone doors there was
a sort of twirlygig like the things that let you
in to the Zoo, where you pay a shilling, and
inside there were decorations made up of
meaningless curves like those with which the
demons have punished the city of Berlin;
the salt at the table was artificial and largely

14 THE FOOTPATH WAY

made of chalk, and the faces of the host and
hostess were no longer kind.

I very well remember another inn which was
native to the Chiltern Hills. This place had
bow windows, which were divided into medium-
sized panes, each of the panes a little rounded ;
and these window-panes were made of that
sort of glass which I will adore until I die,
and which has the property of distorting
exterior objects : of such glass the windows of
schoolrooms and of nurseries used to be made.
I came to that place after many years by
accident, and I found that Orcus, which has
devoured all lovely things, had devoured this
too. The inn was called ''an Hotel," its
front was rebuilt, the windows had only two
panes, each quite enormous and flat, one above
and one below, and the glass was that sort of
thick, transparent glass through which it is
no use to look, for you might as well be look-
ing through air. All the faces were strange
except that of one old servant in the stable-
yard. I asked him if he regretted the old
front, and he said " Lord, no ! " Then he told/
me in great detail how kind the brewers had
been to his master and how willingly they had
rebuilt the whole place. These things recon-
cile one with the grave.

Well then, if walking, which has led me
into this digression, prepares one for the inns

ON WALKING 15

where they are worthy, it has another
character as great and as symbolic and as
worthy of man. For remember that of the
many ways of walking there is one way
which is the greatest of all, and that is to
walk away.

Put your hand before your eyes and remem-
ber, you that have walked, the places from
which you have walked away, and the wilder-
ness into which you manfully turned the steps
of your abandonment.

There is a place above the Roman Wall
beyond the River Tyne where one can do this
thing. Behind one lies the hospitality and the
human noise which have inhabited the town of
the river valley for certainly two thousand
years. Before one is the dead line of the
road, and that complete emptiness of the
moors as they rise up toward Cheviot on the
one hand and Carter Fell upon the other.
The earth is here altogether deserted and
alone : you go out into it because it is your
business to go : you are walking away. As for
your memories, they are of no good to you
except to lend you that dignity which can
always support a memoried man ; you are
bound to forget, and it is your business to
leave all that you have known altogether
behind you, and no man has eyes at the
back of his head — go forward. Upon my

16 THE FOOTPATH WAY

soul I think that the greatest way of walk-
ing, now I consider the matter, or now
that I have stumbled upon it, is walking
away.

H. Belloc.

Walking an Antidote to City
Poison

THERE is moral as well as bodily
wholesomeness in a mountain walk,
if the walker has the understanding
heart, and eschews picnics. It is good for any
man to be alone with nature and himself, or
with a friend who knows when silence is more
sociable than talk :

*' In the wilderness alone,
There where nature worships God."

It is well to be in places where man is little
and God is great — where what he sees all
around him has the same look as it had a
thousand years ago, and will have the same,
in all likelihood, when he has been a thousand
years in his grave. It abates and rectifies a
man, if he is worth the process.

It is not favourable to religious feeling to
hear only of the actions and interference of
man, and to behold nothing but what human
ingenuity has completed. There is an image
of God's greatness impressed upon the outward
B 17

18 THE FOOTPATH WAY

face of nature fitted to make us all pious, and
to breathe into our hearts a purifying and
salutary fear.

In cities everything is man, and man alone.
He seems to move and govern all, and be the
Providence of cities ; and there we do not
render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's,
and unto God the things which are God's ; but
God is forgotten, and Caesar is supreme — all is
human policy, human foresight, human power ;
nothing reminds us of divisible dominion, and
concealed omnipotence — it is all earth, and no
heaven. One cure of this is prayer and the
solitary place. As the body, harassed with the
noxious air of cities, seeks relief in the freedom
and the purity of the fields and hills, so the
mind, wearied by commerce with men, resumes
its vigour in solitude, and repairs its dignity.

Sydney Smith.

On Going a Journey

ONE of the pleasantest things in the
world is going a journey ; but I like
to go by myself. I can enjoy society
in a room ; but out of doors nature is company
enough for me. I am then never less alone
than when alone.

" The fields his study, nature was his book."

I cannot see the wit of walking and talking
at the same time. When I am in the country,
I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not
for criticising hedgerows and black cattle. I
go out of the town in order to forget the town
and all that is in it. There are those who for
this purpose go to watering-places, and carry
the metropolis with them. I like more elbow-
room, and fewer encumbrances. I like soli-
tude, when I give myself up to it, for the sake
of solitude ; nor do I ask for

** A friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper solitude is sweet."

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect
19

20 THE FOOTPATH WAY

liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases.
We go a journey chiefly to be free of all im-
pediments and of all inconveniences ; to leave
ourselves behind, much more to get rid of
others. It is because I want a little breathing-
space to muse on indifferent matters, where
Contemplation

*' May plume her feathers, and let grow her wings
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd,"

that I absent myself from the town for a while
without feeling at a loss the moment I am left
by myself. Instead of a friend in a post-chaise
or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with
and vary the same stale topics over again, for
once let me have a truce with impertinence.
Give me the clear blue sky over my head and
the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road
before me, and a three hours' march to dinner
— and then to thinking ! It is hard if I cannot
start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh,
I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point
of yonder rolling cloud, I plunge into my past
being, and revel there, as the sunburnt Indian
plunges headlong into the wave i;hat wafts
him to his native shore. Then long-forgotten
things, like " sunken wrack and sumless trea-
suries," burst upon my eager sight, and I
begin to feel, think, and be myself again.

ON GOING A JOURNEY 21

Instead of an awkward silence, broken by
attempts at wit or dull commonplaces, mine
is that undisturbed silence of the heart which
alone is perfect eloquence.

No one likes puns, alliterations, antitheses,
argument, and analysis better than I do ; but
I sometimes had rather be without them.
" Leave, oh, leave me to my repose ! " I have
just now other business in hand, which would
seem idle to you ; but is with me " very stuff
o' the conscience." Is not this wild rose sweet
without a comment } Does not this daisy leap
to my heart set in its coat of emerald ? Yet if
I were to explain to you the circumstance that
has so endeared it to me, you would only smile.
Had I not better, then, keep it to myself, and
let it serve me to brood over, from here to
yonder craggy point, and from thence onward
to the far-distant horizon ? I should be but
bad company all that way, and therefore prefer
being alone.

I have heard it said that you may, when the
moody fit comes on, walk or ride on by your-
self, and indulge your reveries. But this looks
like a breach of manners, a neglect of others,
and you are thinking all the time that you
ought to rejoin your party. " Out upon such
half-faced fellowship ! " say I. I like to be
either entirely to myself, or entirely at the
disposal of others ; to talk or be silent, to walk

22 THE FOOTPATH WAY

or sit still, to be sociable or solitary. I was
pleased with an observation of Mr Cobbett's,
that " he thought it a bad French custom to
drink our wine with our meals, and that an
Englishman ought to do only one thing at a
time." So I cannot talk and think, or indulge
in melancholy musing and lively conversation,
by fits and starts. " Let me have a companion
of my way," says Sterne, "were it but to
remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun
declines." It is beautifully said; but, in my
opinion, this continual comparing of notes
interferes with the involuntary impression of
things upon the mind, and hurts the senti-
ment.

If you only hint what you feel in a kind of
dumb show, it is insipid ; if you have to explain
it, it is making a toil of a pleasure. You
cannot read the book of nature without being
perpetually put to the trouble of translating it
for the benefit of others. I am for this synthe-
tical method on a journey in preference to the
analytical. I am content to lay in a stock of
ideas then, and to examine and anatomise
them afterwards. I want to see my v^gue
notions float like the down of the thistle
before the breeze, and not to have them en-
tangled in the briars and thorns of controversy.
For once, I like to have it all my own way ;
and this is impossible unless you are alone.

ON GOING A JOURNEY 23

or in such company as I do not covet. I have
no objection to argue a point with anyone for
twenty miles of measured road, but not for
pleasure. If you remark the scent of a
beanfield crossing the road, perhaps your
fellow-traveller has no smell. If you point to
a distant object, perhaps he is short-sighted,
and has to take out his glass to look at it.
There is a feeling in the air, a tone in the
colour of a cloud, which hits your fancy, but
the effect of which you are unable to account
for. There is then no sympathy, but an un-
easy craving after it, and a dissatisfaction which
pursues you on the way, and in the end prob-
ably produces ill-humour.

Now, I never quarrel with myself, and take
all my own conclusions for granted till I find it
necessary to defend them against objections.
It is not merely that you may not be of accord
on the objects and circumstances that present
themselves before you — these may recall a
number of objects, and lead to associations too
delicate and refined to be possibly communi-
cated to others. Yet these I love to cherish,
and sometimes still fondly clutch them, when
I can escape from the throng to do so. To
give way to our feelings before company seems
extravagance or affectation ; and, on the other
hand, to have to unravel this mystery of our
being at every turn, and to make others take

24 THE FOOTPATH WAY

an equal interest in it (otherwise the end is
not answered), is a task to which few are
competent. We must '^give it an under-
standing, but no tongue." My old friend
Coleridge, however, could do both. He could
go on in the most delightful explanatory way
over hill and dale a summer's day, and convert
a landscape into a didactic poem or a Pindaric
ode. " He talked far above singing." If I
could so clothe my ideas in sounding and
flowing words, I might perhaps wish to have
some one with me to admire the swelling
theme ; or I could be more content, were it
possible for me still to hear his echoing voice
in the woods of All-Foxden. They had " that
fine madness in them which our first poets
had " ; and if they could have been caught
by some rare instrument, would have breathed
such strains as the following : —

' ' Here be woods as green
As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet
As when smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
Face of the curled stream, with flow'rs as many
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any ; ,
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells.
Arbours o'ergrown with woodbines, caves and dells ;
Choose where thou wilt, whilst I sit by and^siiig.
Or gather rushes to make many a ring
For thy long fingers ; tell thee tales of love,
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies ;

ON GOING A JOURNEY 25

How she conveyed him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
To kiss her sweetest."

(Fletcher's " Faithful Shepherdess.")

Had I words and images at command like
these, I would attempt to wake the thoughts
that lie slumbering on golden ridges in the
evening clouds ; but at the sight of nature my
fancy, poor as it is, droops and closes up its
leaves, like flowers at sunset. I can make
nothing out on the spot : I must have time to
collect myself.

In general, a good thing spoils out-of-door
prospects ; it should be reserved for Table-Talk.
Lamb is, for this reason, I take it, the worst
company in the world out of doors ; because he
is the best within. I grant there is one subject
on which it is pleasant to talk on a journey,
and that is, what we shall have for supper
when we get to our inn at night. The open air
improves this sort of conversation or friendly
altercation, by setting a keener edge on appe-
tite. Every mile of the road heightens the
flavour of the viands we expect at the end of
it. How fine it is to enter some old town,
walled and turreted, just at the approach of
nightfall ; or to come to some straggling village,
with the lights streaming through the surround-

26 THE FOOTPATH WAY

ing gloom ; and then after inquiring for the
best entertainment that the place affords, to
''take one's ease at one's inn ! "

These eventful moments in our lives' history
are too precious, too full of solid, heartfelt
happiness, to be frittered and dribbled away in
imperfect sympathy. I would have them all
to myself, and drain them to the last drop ;
they will do to talk of or to write about after-
wards. What a delicate speculation it is, after
drinking whole goblets of tea,

*'The cups that cheer, but not inebriate,"
and letting the fumes ascend into the brain, to
sit considering what we shall have for supper
— eggs and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in
onions, or an excellent veal-cutlet ! Sancho in
such a situation once fixed on cow-heel ; and
his choice, though he could not help it, is not
to be disparaged. Then, in the intervals of
pictured scenery and Shandean contemplation,
to catch the preparation and the stir in the
kitchen (getting ready for the gentleman in
the parlour). Procul, o procul este profani !
These hours are sacred to silence and to mus-
ing, to be treasured up in the memory, and to
feed the source of smiling thoughts hereafter.
I would not waste them in idle talk ; or if I
must have the integrity of fancy broken in
upon, I would rather it were by a stranger
than a friend.

ON GOING A JOURNEY 27

A stranger takes his hue and character from
the time and place ; he is a part of the furniture
and costume of an inn. If he is a Quaker, or
from the West Riding of Yorkshire, so much
the better. I do not even try to sympathise
with him, and he breaks no squares. How I
love to see the camps of the gypsies, and to
sigh my soul into that sort of life ! If I
express this feeling to another, he may qualify
and spoil it with some objection. I associate
nothing with my travelling companion but
present objects and passing events. In his
ignorance of me and my affairs, I in a manner
forget myself. But a friend reminds me of
other things, rips up old grievances, and
destroys the abstraction of the scene. He
comes in ungraciously between us and our
imaginary character. Something is dropped in
the course of conversation that gives a hint
of your profession and pursuits ; or from having
some one with you that knows the less sublime
portions of your history, it seems that other
people do. You are no longer a citizen of the
world ; but your " unhoused free condition is
put into circumspection and confine."

The incognito of an inn is one of its striking
privileges — "lord of one's self, uncumbered
with a name." Oh, it is great to shake off the
trammels of the world and of public opinion ;
to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlast-

28 THE FOOTPATH WAY

ing personal identity in the elements of nature,
and become the creature of the moment, clear
of all ties ; to hold to the universe only by a
dish of sweetbreads, and to owe nothing but
the score of the evening ; and no longer seek-
ing for applause and meeting with contempt,
to be known by no other title than the gentle-
man in the parlour !

One may take one's choice of all characters
in this romantic state of uncertainty as to one's
real pretensions, and become indefinitely re-
spectable and negatively right-worshipful. We
baffle prejudice and disappoint conjecture ; and
from being so to others, begin to be objects of
curiosity and wonder even to ourselves. We
are no more those hackneyed commonplaces
that we appear in the world ; an inn restores
us to the level of nature, and quits scores with
society ! I have certainly spent some enviable
hours at inns — sometimes when I have been
left entirely to myself, and have tried to solve
some metaphysical problem, as once at Witham
Common, where I found out the proof that
likeness is not a case of the association of ideas
— at other times, when there have been pictures
in the room, as at St Neot's (I think it was),
where I first met with Gribelins' engravings
of the Cartoons, into which I entered at once,
and at a little inn on the borders of Wales, where
there happened to be hanging some of Westall's

ON GOING A JOURNEY 29

drawings, which I compared triumphantly (for
a theory that I had, not for the admired artist)
with the figure of a girl who had ferried me
over the Severn standing up in a boat between
me and the twilight. At other times I might
mention luxuriating in books, with a peculiar
interest in this way, as I remember sitting up
half the night to read Paul and Virginia, which
I picked up at an inn at Bridgewater, after
being drenched in the rain all day; and at
the same place I got through two volumes of
Madame D'Arblay's Caviilla.

It was on the 10th of April 1798, that I sat
down to a volume of the New Hcldise, at the inn
at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a
cold chicken. The letter I chose was that
in which St Preux describes his feelings as he
first caught a glimpse from the heights of the
Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which I had brought
with me as a hon bouche to crown the evening
with. It was my birthday, and I had for the
first time come from a place in the neighbour-
hood to visit this delightful spot. The road to
Llangollen turns off between Chirk and Wrex-
ham ; and on passing a certain point you come
all at once upon the valley, which opens like
an amphitheatre, broad, barren hills rising
in majestic state on either side, with "green
upland swells that echo to the bleat of
flocks" below, and the river Dee babbling

30 THE FOOTPATH WAY

over its stony bed in the midst of them. The
valley at this time ^'^ glittered green with
sunny shov^^ers/' and a budding ash- tree dipped
its tender branches in the chiding stream.

How proud, how glad I was to walk along
the highroad that overlooks the delicious
prospect, repeating the lines which I have
just quoted from Mr Coleridge's poems ! But
besides the prospect which opened beneath my
feet, another also opened to my inward sight,
a heavenly vision on which were written in
letters large as Hope could make them, these
four words, Liberty, Genius, Love, Virtue,
which have since faded into the light of the
common day, or mock my idle gaze.

" The beautiful is vanished, and returns not."

Still, I would return some time or other
to this enchanted spot ; but I would return to
it alone. What other self could I find to share
that influx of thoughts, of regret, and delight,
the fragments of which I could hardly conjure
up to myself, so much have they been broken
and defaced } I could stand on some tall rock,
and overlook the precipice of years that
separates me from what I then was,.^ 1 was
at that time going shortly to visit the poet
whom I have above named. Where is he now f
Not only I myself have changed ; the world,
which was then new to me, has become old

ON GOING A JOURNEY 31

and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in
thought, O sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and
gladness, as thou then wert; and thou shalt
always be to me the river of Paradise, where
I will drink of the waters of life freely !

There is hardly anything that shows the
short - sightedness or capriciousness of the
imagination more than travelling does. With
change of place we change our ideas ; nay, our
opinions and feelings. We can by an effort,
indeed, transport ourselves to old and long-
forgotten scenes, and then the picture of the
mind revives again ; but we forget those that
we have just left. It seems that we can think
but of one place at a time. The canvas of the
fancy is but of a certain extent, and if we
paint one set of objects upon it, they imme-
diately efface every other. We cannot enlarge
our conceptions, we only shift our point of
view. The landscape bares its bosom to the
enraptured eye ; we take our fill of it, and
seem as if we could form no other image of
beauty or grandeur. We pass on, and think
no more of it : the horizon that shuts it from
our sight also blots it from our memory like
a dream. In travelling through a wild, barren
country, I can form no idea of a woody and
cultivated one. It appears to me that all the
world must be barren, like what I see of it.
In the country we forget the town, and in

32 THE FOOTPATH WAY

town we despise the country. " Beyond Hyde
Park/' says Sir Fopling Flutter, "all is a desert."
All that part of the map that we do not see
before us is blank. The world in our conceit
of it is not much bigger than a nutshell. It
is not one prospect expanded into another,
county joined to county, kingdom to kingdom,
land to seas, making an image voluminous and
vast ; the mind can form no larger idea of
space than the eye can take in at a single
glance. The rest is a name written in a map,
a calculation of arithmetic.

For instance, what is the true signification
of that immense mass of territory and popula-
tion known by the name of China to us } An
inch of pasteboard on a wooden globe, of no
more account than a china orange ! Things
near us are seen of the size of life ; things at
a distance are diminished to the size of the
understanding. We measure the universe by
ourselves, and even comprehend the texture of
our own being only piecemeal. In this way,
however, Ave remember an infinity of things
and places. The mind is like a mechanical in-
strument that plays a great variety of tunes,
but it must play them in succession^ One idea
recalls another, but at the same time excludes
all others. In trying to renew old recollec-
tions, we cannot as it were unfold the whole web
of our existence ; we must pick out the single

ON GOING A JOURNEY 33

threads. So in coming to a place where we
have formerly lived, and with which we have
intimate associations, every one must have
found that the feeling grows more vivid the
nearer we approach the spot, from the mere
anticipation of the actual impression : we
remember circumstances, feelings, persons,
faces, names that we had not thought of for
years ; but for the time all the rest of the
world is forgotten ! To return to the question
I have quitted above :

I have no objection to go to see ruins,
aqueducts, pictures, in company with a friend
or a party, but rather the contrary, for the
former reason reversed. They are intelligible
matters, and will bear talking about. The
sentiment here is not tacit, but communicable
and overt. Salisbury Plain is barren of criti-
cism, but Stonehenge will bear a discussion
antiquarian, picturesque, and philosophical. In
setting out on a party of pleasure, the first
consideration always is where we shall go to :
in taking a solitary ramble, the question is
what we shall meet with by the way. ^^ The
mind is its own place " ; nor are we anxious to
arrive at the end of our journey. I can myself
do the honours indifferently well to the works
of art and curiosity. I once took a party
to Oxford, with no mean eclat — showed them
that seat of the Muses at a distance.

34 THE FOOTPATH WAY

" With glistering spires and pinnacles adorn'd,"

descanted on the learned air that breathes from
the grassy quadrangles and stone walls of halls
and colleges ; was at home in the Bodleian ;
and at Blenheim quite superseded the powdered
cicerone that attended us, and that pointed in
vain with his wand to commonplace beauties in
matchless pictures.

As another exception to the above reasoning,
I should not feel confident in venturing on a
journey in a foreign country without a com-
panion. I should want at intervals to hear
the sound of my own language. There is an
involuntary antipathy in the mind of an
Englishman to foreign manners and notions
that requires the assistance of social sympathy
to carry it off. As the distance from home
increases, this relief, which was at first a
luxury, becomes a passion and an appetite.
A person would almost feel stifled to find
himself in the deserts of Arabia without friends
and countrymen : there must be allowed to be
something in the view of Athens or old Rome
that claims the utterance of speech ; and I
own that the Pyramids are too mighty for any
single contemplation. In such situations, so
opposite to all one's ordinary train of ideas,
one seems a species by one's self, a limb torn

II

ON GOING A JOURNEY 35

off from society, unless one can meet with
instant fellowship and support.

Yet I did not feel this want or craving very
pressing once, when I first set my foot on the
laughing shores of France. Calais was peopled
with novelty and delight. The confused, busy
murmur of the place was like oil and wine
poured into my ears ; nor did the mariners'
hymn, which was sung from the top of an old
crazy vessel in the harbour, as the sun went
down, send an alien sound into my soul. I
only breathed the air of general humanity.
I walked over " the vine-covered hills and gay
regions of France," erect and satisfied ; for the
image of man was not cast down and chained
to the foot of arbitrary thrones : I was at no
loss for language, for that of all the great
schools of painting was open to me. The
whole is vanished like a shade. Pictures,
heroes, glory, freedom, all are fled ; nothing
remains but the Bourbons and the French
people !

There is undoubtedly a sensation in travel-
ling into foreign parts that is to be had
nowhere else ; but it is more pleasing at the
time than lasting. It is too remote from our
habitual associations to be a common topic of
discourse or reference, and, like a dream or
another state of existence, does not piece into
our daily modes of Ufe. It is an animated but

36 THE FOOTPATH WAY

a momentary hallucination. It demands an
effort to exchange our actual for our ideal
identity ; and to feel the pulse of our old
transports revive very keenly, we must "jump "
all our present comforts and connections. Our
romantic and itinerant character is not to be
domesticated. Dr Johnson remarked how little
foreign travel added to the facilities of con-
versation in those who had been abroad. In
factj the time we have spent there is both
delightful and, in one sense, instructive ; but
it appears to be cut out of our substantial down-
right existence, and never to join kindly on to
it. We are not the same, but another, and
perhaps more enviable individual all the time
we are out of our own country. We are lost
to ourselves as well as to our friends. So the
poet somewhat quaintly sings :

*• Out of my country and myself I go."

Those who wish to forget painful thoughts
do well to absent themselves for a while from
the ties and objects that recall them : but we
can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the
place that gave us birth. I should on this
account like well enough to spend the whole
of my life in travelling abroad, if I could
anywhere borrow another life to spend after-
wards at home !

William Hazlitt.

The Bishop of Salisbury's
Horse

As soon as he was perfectly recovered
of this sickness, he took a journey
k.from Oxford to Exeter, to satisfy and
see his good Mother, being accompanied with a
countryman and companion of his own College,
and both on foot ; which was then either more
in fashion, or want of money, or their humility
made it so : but on foot they went, and took
Salisbury on their way, purposely to see the
good Bishop, who made Mr Hooker and his
companion dine with him at his own table :
which Mr Hooker boasted of with much joy
and gratitude when he saw his mother and
friends : and at the Bishop's parting with him,
the Bishop gave him good counsel, and his
benediction, but forgot to give him money ;
which when the Bishop had considered, he
sent a servant in all haste to call Richard back
to him : and at Richard's return, the Bishop
said to him, '' Richard, I sent for you back to
lend you a horse, which hath carried me many
a mile, and, I thank God, with much ease " ;

37

38 THE FOOTPATH WAY

and presently delivered into his hand a walking-
staff, with which he professed he had travelled
through many parts of Germany. And he
said, " Richard, I do not give, but lend you
my horse : be sure you be honest, and bring
my horse back to me at your return this way
to Oxford. And I do now give you ten groats,
to bear your charges to Exeter : and here is
ten groats more, which I charge you to deliver
to your Mother and tell her I send her a
Bishop's benediction with it, and beg the con-
tinuance of her prayers for me. And if you
bring my horse back to me, I will give you
ten groats more, to carry you on foot to the
College, and so God bless you, good Richard."

Izaak Wallon.

A Strolling Pedlar

MY frame gradually became hardened
with my constitution^ and being
both tall and muscular, I was
rather disfigured than disabled by my lame-
ness. This personal disadvantage did not
prevent me from taking much exercise on
horseback, and making long journeys on foot,
in the course of which I often walked from
twenty to thirty miles a day.

A distinct instance occurs to me. I re-
member walking with poor James Ramsay,
my fellow-apprentice, now no more, and two
other friends, to breakfast at Prestonpans. We
spent the forenoon visiting the ruins at Seton
and the field of battle at Preston — dined at
Prestonpans on tiled haddocks very sumptu-
ously— drank half a bottle of port each, and
returned in the evening. This could not be
less than thirty miles, nor do I remember
being at all fatigued upon the occasion.

These excursions on foot; and horseback
formed by far my most favourite amusement.
I have all my life delighted in travelling,
though I have never enjoyed that pleasure

39

40 THE FOOTPATH WAY

upon a large scale. It was a propensity which
I sometimes indulged so unduly as to alarm
and vex my parents. Wood, water, wilderness
itself had an inexpressible charm for me, and
I had a dreamy way of going much farther
than I intended, so that unconsciously my
return was protracted, and my parents had
sometimes serious cause of uneasiness. For
example, I once set out with Mr George
Abercromby (son of the immortal general),
Mr William Clerk, and some others, to fish
in the lake above Howgate, and the stream
which descends from it into the Esk. We
breakfasted at Howgate, and fished the whole
day ; and while we were on our return next
morning, I was easily seduced by William
Clerk, then a great intimate, to visit Pennycuik
House, the seat of his family. Here he and
John Irving, and I for their sake, were over-
whelmed with kindness by the late Sir John
Clerk and his lady, the present Dowager Lady
Clerk. The pleasure of looking at fine pictures,
the beauty of the place, and the flattering
hospitality of the owners, drowned all re-
collection of home for a day or two. Mean-
while our companions, who had walked on
without being aware of our digression, returned
to Edinburgh without us, and excited no small
alarm in my father's household. At length,
however, they became accustomed to my

A STROLLING PEDLAR 41

escapades. My father used to protest to me
on such occasions that he thought I was born
to be a strolling pedlar; and though the pre-
diction was intended to mortify my conceit,
I am not sure that I altogether disliked it.
I was now familiar with Shakespeare, and
thought of Autolycus's song :

"Jog on, jog on the footpath way
And merrily hent the stile-a ;•
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a."

Sir Walter Scott.

A Stout Pedestrian

LET the reader conceive to himself a
clear frosty November morning, the
scene an open heath, having for the
background that huge chain of mountains in
which Skiddaw and Saddleback are pre-
eminent ; let him look along that blind road,
by which I mean the track so slightly marked
by the passengers' footsteps that it can but
be traced by a slight shade of verdure from
the darker heath around it, and, being only
visible to the eye when at some distance,
ceases to be distinguished while the foot is
actually treading it — along this faintly-traced
path advances the object of our present
narrative. His firm step, his erect and free
carriage, have a military air, which corresponds
well with his well-proportioned limbs, and
stature of six feet high. His dress is so
plain and simple that it indicates nothing as
to rank — it may be that of a gentleman who
travels in this manner for his pleasure, or of
an inferior person of whom it is the proper
and usual garb. Nothing can be on a more
reduced scale than his travelling equipment.

42

I

A STOUT PEDESTRIAN 43

A volume of Shakespeare in each pocket, a
small bundle with a change of linen slung
across his shoulders, an oaken cudgel in his
hand, complete our pedestrian's accommoda-
tions, and in this equipage we present him
to our readers.

Brown had parted that morning from his
friend Dudley, and began his solitary walk
towards Scotland.

The first two or three miles were rather
melancholy, from want of the society to
which he had of late been accustomed. But
this unusual mood of mind soon gave way
to the influence of his natural good spirits,
excited by the exercise and the bracing effects
of the frosty air. He whistled as he went
along, not " from want of thought," but to
give vent to those buoyant feelings which
he had no other mode of expressing. For
each peasant whom he chanced to meet, he
had a kind greeting or a good-humoured jest;
the hardy Cumbrians grinned as they passed,
and said, "That's a kind heart, God bless
un ! " and the market-girl looked more than
once over her shoulder at the athletic form,
which corresponded so well with the frank
and blithe address of the stranger. A rough
terrier dog, his constant companion, who
rivalled his master in glee, scampered at
large in a thousand wheels round the heath.

44 THE FOOTPATH WAY

and came back to jump up on him, and assure
him that he participated in the pleasure of the
journey. Dr Johnson thought Hfe had few
things better than the excitation produced by
being whirled rapidly along in a post-chaise ;
but he who has in youth experienced the
confident and independent feeling of a stout
pedestrian in an interesting countiy, and
during fine weather, will hold the taste of
the great moralist cheap in comparison.

Part of Brown's view in choosing that unusual
tract which leads through the eastern walls
of Cumberland into Scotland, had been a desire
to view the remains of the celebrated Roman
Wall, which are more visible in that direction
than in any other part of its extent. His
education had been imperfect and desultory ;
but neither the busy scenes in which he had
been engaged, nor the pleasures of youth,
nor the precarious state of his own circum-
stances, had diverted him from the task of
mental improvement. — " And this then is the
Roman Wall," he said, scrambling up to a
height which commanded the course of that
celebrated work of antiquity: "What a
people ! whose labours, even at tlxis ex-
tremity of their empire, comprehended such
space, and were executed upon a scale of
such grandeur! In future ages, when the
science of war shall have changed, how few

A STOUT PEDESTRIAN 45

traces will exist of the labours of Vauban
and Coehorn, while this wonderful people's
remains will even then continue to interest
and astonish posterity ! Their fortifications,
their aqueducts, their theatres, their fountains,
all their public works, bear the grave, solid,
and majestic character of their language ;
while our modern labours, like our modern
tongues, seem but constructed out of their
fragments." Having thus moralised, he re-
membered that he was hungry, and pursued
his walk to a small public-house at which he
proposed to get some refreshment.

The alehouse, for it was no better, was
situated in the bottom of a little dell,
through which trilled a small rivulet. It
was shaded by a large ash-tree, against which
the clay-built shed, that served the purpose
of a stable, was erected, and upon which it
seemed partly to recline. In this shed stood
a saddled horse, employed in eating his corn.
The cottages in this part of Cumberland
partake of the rudeness which characterises
those of Scotland. The outside of the house
promised little for the interior, notwithstand-
ing the vaunt of a sign, where a tankard of
ale voluntarily decanted itself into a tumbler,
and a hieroglyphical scrawl below attempted
to express a promise of " good entertainment
for man and horse." Brown was no fastidious

46 THE FOOTPATH WAY

traveller — he stooped and entered the
cabaret.

The first object which caught his eye in the
kitchen was a tall, stout, country-looking man,
in a large jockey great-coat, the owner of the
horse which stood in the shed, who was busy
discussing huge slices of cold boiled beef, and
casting from time to time an eye through the
window, to see how his steed sped with his
provender. A large tankard of ale flanked
his plate of victuals, to which he applied him-
self by intervals. The good woman of the
house was employed in baking. The fire, as
is usual in that country, was on a stone hearth,
in the midst of an immensely large chimney,
which had two seats extended beneath the
vent. On one of these sat a remarkably tall
woman, in a red cloak and slouched bonnet,
having the appearance of a tinker or beggar.
She was busily engaged with a short black
tobacco-pipe.

At the request of Brown for some food, the
landlady wiped with her mealy apron one
corner of the deal table, placed a wooden
trencher and knife and fork before the
traveller, pointed to the round &f beef,
recommended Mr Dinmont's good example,
and, finally, filled a brown pitcher with her
home-brewed. Brown lost no time in doing
ample credit to both. For a while, his

A STOUT PEDESTRIAN 47

opposite neighbour and he were too busy to
take much notice of each other, except by a
good-humoured nod as each in turn raised
the tankard to his head. At length, when
our pedestrian began to supply the wants of
little Wasp, the Scotch store-farmer, for such
was Mr Dinmont, found himself at leisure to
enter into conversation.

Sij' Walter Scott, — ''Guy Mannering."

Lake Scenery

THE morning was clear and cheerful
after a night of sharp frost. At ten
o'clock we took our way on foot
towards Pooley Bridge on the same side of
the lake we had coasted in a boat the day
before. — Looked backwards to the south from
our favourite station above Blowick. The
dazzling sunbeams striking upon the church
and village^ while the earth was steaming with
exhalations not traceable in other quarters,
rendered their forms even more indistinct
than the partial and flitting veil of unillumined
vapour had done two days before. The grass
on which we trod, and the trees in every
thicket, were dripping with melted hoar-frost.
We observed the lemon-coloured leaves of the
birches, as the breeze turned them to the sun,
sparkle, or rather ^«*/z, like diamonds, and the
leafless purple twigs were tipped with glbbes
of shining crystal. _-^

The day continued delightful, and un-
clouded to the end. I will not describe the
country which we slowly travelled through nor
relate our adventures ; and will only add, that

48

LAKE SCENERY 49

on the afternoon of the thirteenth we re-
turned along the banks of Ulswater by the
usual road. The lake lay in deep repose after
the agitations of a wet and stormy morning.
The trees in Gowbarrow park were in that
state when what is gained by the exposure of
their bark and branches compensates, almost,
for the loss of foliage, exhibiting the variety
which characterises the point of time between
autumn and winter. The hawthorns were
leafless ; their round heads covered with rich
scarlet berries, and adorned with arches of
green brambles, and eglantines hung with
glossy hips ; and the grey trunks of some of
the ancient oak, which in the summer season
might have been regarded only for their
venerable majesty, now attracted notice by a
pretty embellishment of green mosses and
fern intermixed with russet leaves retained by
those slender outstarting twigs which the
veteran tree would not have tolerated in his
strength.

The smooth silver branches of the ashes
were bare ; most of the alders as green as the
Devonshire cottage-myrtle that weathers the
snows of Christmas. — Will you accept it as
some apology for my having dwelt so long on
the woodland ornaments of these scenes — that
artists speak of the trees on the banks of Uls-
water, and especially along the bays of

50 THE FOOTPATH WAY

Stybarrow crags, as having a peculiar character
of picturesque intricacy in their stems and
branches, which their rocky stations and the
mountain winds have combined to give them ?

At the end of Gowbarrow park a large herd
of deer were either moving slowly or standing
still among the fern.

I was sorry when a chance-companion, who
had joined us by the way, startled them with
a whistle, disturbing an image of grave
simplicity and thoughtful enjoyment; for I
could have fancied that those natives of this
wild and beautiful region were partaking with
us a sensation of the solemnity of the closing
day. The sun had been set some time ; and
we could perceive that the light was fading
away from the coves of Helvellyn, but the lake
under a luminous sky, was more brilliant than
before. After tea at Patterdale, set out again :
— a fine evening ; the seven stars close to the
mountain-top ; all the stars seemed brighter
than usual. The steeps were reflected in
Brotherswater, and, above the lake appeared
like enormous black perpendicular walls. The
Kirkstone torrents had been swoln by the
rain, and now filled the mountain pass with
their roaring, which added greatly to the
solemnity of our walk. Behind us, when we
had climbed to a great height, we saw one
light very distant in the vale, like a large red

LAKE SCENERY 51

star — a solitary one in the gloomy region.
The cheerfulness of the scene was in the sky
above us. Reached home a little before
midnight.

William Wordsworth.

Walking, and the Wild

I WISH to speak a word for Nature, for
absolute freedom and wildness, as con-
trasted with a freedom and culture merely
civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a
part and parcel of Nature, rather than a
member of society. I wish to make an extreme
statement, if so I may make an emphatic one,
for there are enough champions of civilisation :
the minister and the school committee, and
every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in
the course of my life who understood the art
of Walking, that is, of taking walks, — who had
a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which
word is beautifully derived " from idle people
who roved about the country, in the Middle
Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of
going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land,
till the children exclaimed, "There goes a
Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer — a Holy- Lander.
They who never go to the Holy Land in their
walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers
and vagabonds ; but they who do go there are
saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean

52

WALKING, AND THE WILD 53

Some, however, would derive the word from
sans terre, without land or a home, which
therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having
no particular home, but equally at home
everywhere. For this is the secret of success-
ful sauntering. He who sits still in a house
all the time may be the greatest vagrant of
all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is
no more vagrant than the meandering river,
which is all the while sedulously seeking the
shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the
first, which indeed is the most probable
derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade,
preached by some Peter the Hermit in us,
to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from
the hands of the Infidels.

It is true we are but faint-hearted crusaders,
even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake
no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our
expeditions are but tours, and come round
again at evening to the old hearth-side from
which we set out. Half the work is but re-
tracing our steps. We should go forth on the
shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of
undying adventure, never to return — pre-
pared to send back our embalmed hearts only
as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are
ready to leave father and mother, and brother
and sister, and wife and child and friends, and
never see them again — if you have paid your

54 THE FOOTPATH WAY

debts, and made your will, and settled all
your affairs, and are a free man, then you are
ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my
companion and I, for I sometimes have a com-
panion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves
knights of a new, or rather an old, order — not
Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders,
but Walkers, a still more ancient and honour-
able class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic
spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems
now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided
into, the Walker, — not the Knight, but Walker
Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside
of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone here-
abouts practised this noble art ; though, to tell
the truth, at least if their own assertions are
to be received, most of my townsmen would
fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot.
No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, free-
dom, and independence, which are the capital
in this profession. It comes only by the grace
of God. It requires a direct dispensation from
Heaven to become a walker. You must
be born into the family of the Walkers.
Ambulator nascitur, nonjit. Some of my towns-
men, it is true, can remember and have
described to me some walks which they took
ten years ago, in which they were so blessed

WALKING, AND THE WILD 55

as to lose themselves for half-an-hour in the
woods ; but I know very well that they have
confined themselves to the highway ever since,
whatever pretensions they may make to be-
long to this select class. No doubt they were
elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence
of a previous state of existence, when even
they were foresters and outlaws.

" When he came to grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge.

** It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,

That I was last here ;
Me lyste a lytell for to shote

At the donne dere."
I think that I cannot preserve my health
and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at
least — and it is commonly more than that —
sauntering through the woods and over the
hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly
engagements. You may safely say, A penny
for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds.
When sometimes I am reminded that the
mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops
not only all the forenoon, but all the after-
noon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many
of them — as if the legs were made to sit upon,
and not to stand or walk upon — I think that
they deserve some credit for not having all
committed suicide long ago.

56 THE FOOTPATH WAY

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a
single day without acquiring some rust, and
when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk
at the eleventh hour of four o'clock in the
afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when
the shades of night were already beginning
to be mingled with the daylight, have felt
as if I had committed some sin to be atoned
for, — I confess that I am astonished at the
power of endurance, to say nothing of the
moral insensibility, of my neighbours who
confine themselves to shops and offices the
whole day for weeks and months, ay, and
years almost together. I know not what
manner of stuff they are of — sitting there now
at three o'clock in the afternoon, as if it were
three o'clock in the morning. Bonaparte may
talk of the three - o'clock - in - the - morning
courage, but it is nothing to the courage which
can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the
afternoon over against one's self whom you
have known all the morning, to starve out
a garrison to whom you are bound by such
strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about
this time, or say between four and five o'clock
in the afternoon, too late for the m9riiing
papers and too early for the evening ones,
there is not a general explosion heard up and
down the street, scattering a legion of anti-
quated and house-bred notions and whims to

WALKING, AND THE WILD 57

the four winds for an airing — and so the evil
cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the
house still more than men, stand it I do not
know ; but I have ground to suspect that
most of them do not stand it at all. When,
early in the summer afternoon, we have been
shaking the dust of the village from the skirts
of our garments, making haste past those
houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts,
which have such an air of repose about them,
my companion whispers that probably about
these times their occupants are all gone to bed.
Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the
glory of architecture, which itself never turns
in, but for ever stands out and erect, keeping
watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all,
age, have a good deal to do with it. As a
man grows older, his ability to sit still and
follow indoor occupations increases. He grows
vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life
approaches, till at last he comes forth only
just before sundown, and gets all the walk
that he requires in half-an-hour.

But the walking of which I speak has
nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is
called, as the sick take medicine at stated
hours — as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs ;
but is itself the enterprise and adventure of

58 THE FOOTPATH WAY

the day. If you would get exercise, go in
search of the springs of hfe. Think of a
man's swinging dumb-bells for his health,
when those springs are bubbling up in far-off
pastures unsought by him !

Moreover, you must walk like a camel,
which is said to be the only beast which
ruminates when walking. When a traveller
asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her
master's study, she answered, "Here is his
library, but his study is out of doors."

Living much out of doors, in the sun and
wind, will no doubt produce a certain rough-
ness of character — will cause a thicker cuticle
to grow over some of the finer qualities of our
nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe
manual labour robs the hands of some of their
delicacy of touch. So staying in the house,
on the other hand, may produce a softness and
smoothness, not to say thinness of skin,
accompanied by an increased sensibility to
certain impressions. Perhaps we should be
more susceptible to some influences important
to our intellectual and moral growth if the sun
had shone and the wind blown on us a little
less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to
proportion rightly the thick and thin skin.
But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off
fast enough — that the natural remedy is to be
found in the proportion which the night bears

WALKING, AND THE WILD 59

to the day, the winter to the summer, thought
to experience. There will be so much the
more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The
callous palms of the labourer are conversant
with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism,
whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid
fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality
that lies abed by day and thinks itself white,
far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the
fields and woods : what would become of us if
we walked only in the garden or a mall ?
Even some sects of philosophers have felt the
necessity of importing the woods to themselves,
since they did not go to the woods. "They
planted groves and walks of Platanes," where
they took subdiales amhulationes in porticos
open to the air. Of course it is of no use to
direct our steps to the woods if they do not
carry us thither. I am alarmed when it
happens that I have walked a mile into the
woods bodily without getting there in spirit.
In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all
my morning occupations and my obligations
to society. But it sometimes happens that
I cannot easily shake off the village. The
thought of some work will run in my head,
and I am not where my body is — I am out of
my senses. In my walks I would fain return
to my senses. What business have I in the

60 THE FOOTPATH WAY

woods, if I am thinking of something out of
the woods ? I suspect myself, and cannot
help a shudder, when I find myself so im-
plicated even in what are called good works —
for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks ; and
though for so many years I have walked
almost every day, and sometimes for several
days together, I have not yet exhausted them.
An absolutely new prospect is a great happi-
ness, and I can still get this any afternoon.
Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as
strange a country as I expect ever to see. A
single farmhouse which I had not seen before
is sometimes as good as the dominions of the
King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of
harmony discoverable between the capabilities
of the landscape within a circle of ten miles'
radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and
the threescore years and ten of human life.
It will never become quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements,
so called, as the building of houses, and the
cutting down of the forest and of all large
trees, simply deform the landscape, and make
it more and more tame and cheap. A people
who would begin by burning the fences and
let the forest stand ! I saw the fences half
consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the
prairie, and some worldly miser with a sur-

WALKING, AND THE WILD 6l

veyor looking after his bounds, while heaven
had taken place around him, and he did not
see the angels going to and fro, but was look-
ing for an old posthole in the midst of paradise.
I looked again, and saw him standing in the
middle of a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded by
devils, and he had found his bounds without a
doubt, three little stones, where a stake had
been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that
the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any
number of miles, commencing at my own door,
without going by any house, without crossing
a road except where the fox and the mink do :
first along by the river, and then the brook,
and then the meadow and the wood-side.
There are square miles in my vicinity which
have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can
see civilisation and the abodes of man afar.
The farmers and their works are scarcely more
obvious than woodchucks and their burrows.
Man and his affairs, church and state and
school, trade and commerce, and manufactures
and agriculture, even politics, the most alarm-
ing of them all, — I am pleased to see how little
space they occupy in the landscape. Politics
is but a narrow field, and that still narrower
highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes
direct the traveller thither. If you would go
to the political world, follow the great road —

62 THE FOOTPATH WAY

follow that market-man, keep his dust in your
eyes, and it will lead you straight to it ; for it,
too, has its place merely, and does not occupy
all space. I pass from it as from a beanfield
into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one
half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the
earth's surface where a man does not stand
from one year's end to another and there,
consequently, politics are not, for they are but
as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads
tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a
lake of a river. It is the body of which roads
are the arms and legs — a trivial or quadrivial
place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of
travellers. The word is from the Latin villa,
which, together with via, a way, or more
anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho,
to carry, because the villa is the place to and
from which things are carried. They who get
their living by teaming were said vellaturam
facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin
word vilis and our vile ; also villain. This
suggests what kind of degeneracy villagei-s
are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel
that goes by and over them, without travelling
themselves.

Some do not walk at all ; others walk in the
highways ; a few walk across lots. Roads are
made for horses and men of business. I do

WALKING, AND THE WILD 63

not travel in them much, comparatively,
because I am not in a hurry to get to any
tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to
which they lead. I am a good horse to
travel, but not from choice a roadster. The
landscape-painter uses the figures of men to
mark a road. He would not make that use of
my figure. I walk out into a Nature such as
the old prophets and poets. Menu, Moses,
Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name
it America, but it is not America : neither
Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the
rest were the discoverers of it. There is a
truer account of it in mythology than in any
history of America, so called, that I have
seen.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of
the land is not private property ; the landscape
is not owned, and the walker enjoys com-
parative freedom. But possibly the day will
come when it will be partitioned off into so-
called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will
take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, —
when fences shall be multiplied, and man-
traps and other engines invented to confine
men to the public road, and walking over the
surface of God's earth shall be construed to
mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds.
To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to
exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of

64 THE FOOTPATH WAY

it. Let us improve our opportunities, then,
before the evil days come.

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes
to determine whither we will walk ? I believe
that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature
which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will
direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us
which way we walk. There is a right way ;
but we are very liable from heedlessness and
stupidity to take the wrong one. We would
fain take that walk, never yet taken by us
through this actual world, which is perfectly
symbolical of the path which we love to travel
in the interior and ideal world ; and sometimes,
no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our
direction, because it does not yet exist dis-
tinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk,
uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps,
and submit myself to my instinct to decide for
me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may
seem, that I finally and inevitably settle south-
west, toward some particular wood or meadow
or deserted pasture or hill in that direction.
My needle is slow to settle, — vari^s^ a few
degrees, and does not always point due south-
west, it is true, and it has good authority for
this variation, but it always settles between
west and south-south-west. The future lies

WALKING, AND THE WILD 65

that way to me, and the earth seems more un-
exhausted and richer on that side. The outline
which would bound my walks would be, not a
circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those
cometary orbits which have been thought to
be non-returning curves, in this case opening
westward, in which my house occupies the
place of the sun. I turn round and round
irresolute, sometimes for a quarter of an hour,
until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I
will walk into the south-west or west. East-
ward I go only by force ; but westward I go
free. Thither no business leads me. It is
hard for me to believe that I shall find fair
landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom
behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited
by the prospect of a walk thither; but I
believe that the forest which I see in the
western horizon stretches uninterruptedly to-
ward the setting sun, and there are no towns
nor cities in it of enough consequence to
disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this
side is the city, on that the wilderness, and
ever I am leaving the city more and more, and
withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not
lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not
believe that something like this is the pre-
vailing tendency of my countrymen. I must
walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.
And that way the nation is moving, and I may

E

66 THE FOOTPATH WAY

say that mankind progress from east to west.
Within a few years we have witnessed the
phenomenon of a south-eastward migration in
the settlement of Australia ; but this affects us
as a retrograde movement, and, judging from
the moral and physical character of the first
generation of Australians, has not yet proved
a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars
think that there is nothing west beyond
Thibet. "The world ends there/' say they;
"beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea."
It is unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realise history and study
the works of art and literature, retracing the
steps of the race ; we go westward as into the
future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.
The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our pas-
sage over which we have had an opportunity
to forget the Old World and its institutions.
If we do not succeed this time, there is
perhaps one more chance for the race left
before it arrives on the banks of the Styx ;
and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which
is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far
it is an evidence of singularity, that an Indi-
vidual should thus consent in his pettiest walk
with the general movement of the race ; but
I know that something akin to the migratory
instinct in birds and quadrupeds, — which, in

WALKING, AND THE WILD 67

some instances, is known to have affected the
squirrel tribe, impelhng them to a general and
mysterious movement, in which they were seen,
say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on
its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail,
and bridging narrower streams with their dead,
— that something like b. furor which affects the
domestic cattle in the spring, and which is
referred to a worm in their tails, — affects both
nations and individuals, either perennially or
from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese
cackles over our town, but it to some extent
unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if
I were a broker, I should probably take that
disturbance into account.

*' Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmares for to seken strange strondes."

Every sunset which I witness inspires me
with the desire to go to a W^est as distant and
as fair as that into which the sun goes down.
He appears to migrate westward daily, and
tempts us to follow him. He is the Great
Western Pioneer whom the nations follow.
We dream all night of those mountain-ridges
in the horizon, though they may be of vapour
only, which were last gilded by his rays. The
islands of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens
of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise,
appear to have been the Great West of the

68 THE FOOTPATH WAY

ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry.
Who has not seen in imagination, when look-
ing into the sunset sky, the gardens of the
Hesperides, and the foundation of all those
fables ?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more
strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and
found a New World for Castile and Leon.
The head of men in those days scented fresh
pastures from afar.

"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay ;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue ;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

Where on the globe can there be found
an area of equal extent with that occupied by
the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich
and varied in its proportions, and at the same
time so habitable by the European, as this is }
Michaux, who knew but part of them, says
that "the species of large trees are much
more numerous in North America than in
Europe ; in the United States there are morej
than one hundred and forty species that e^^-
ceed thirty feet in height ; in Franc^ihere
are but thirty that attain this size." Later
botanists more than confirm his observations.
Humboldt came to America to realise his
youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and

WALKING, AND THE WILD 69

he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the
primitive forests of the Amazon^ the most
gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so
eloquently described. The geographer Guyot,
himself a European, goes farther — farther than
I am ready to follow him ; yet not when he
says : " As the plant is made for the animal, as
the vegetable world is made for the animal
world, America is made for the man of the Old
World. . . . The man of the Old World sets
out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of
Asia, he descends from station to station
towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked
by a new civilisation superior to the preced-
ing, by a greater power of development.
Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore
of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he
knows not, and turns upon his footprints for
an instant." When he has exhausted the
rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself,
''then recommences his adventurous career
westward as in the earliest ages." So far
Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact
with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the
commerce and enterprise of modern times.
The younger Michaux, in his Travels West of
the Alleghanies in 1802, says that the common
inquiry in the newly settled West was, " ' From
what part of the world have you come } ' As

70 THE FOOTPATH WAY

if these vast and fertile regions would naturally
be the place of meeting and common country
of all the inhabitants of the globe."

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say.
Ex Oriente lux ; ex Occidente frux. From the
East light ; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and
a Governor-General of Canada, tells us that
^'in both the northern and southern hemi-
spheres of the New World, Nature has not
only outlined her words on a larger scale, but
has painted the whole picture with brighter
and more costly colours than she used in de-
lineating and in beautifying the Old World.
. . . The heavens of America appear infinitely
higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the
cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars
are brighter, the thunder is louder, the light-
ning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is
heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers
longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader."
This statement will do at least to set against
Buffon's account of this part of the world and
its productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, " Nescio quce fades
laeta, glabra plantis Americanis: I know not
what there is of joyous and smooth in the
aspect of American plants " ; and I think that
in this country there are no, or at most very
few, AfricancB hestice, African beasts, as the

WALKING, AND THE WILD 71

Romans called them, and that in this respect
also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of
man. We are told that within three miles of
the centre of the East Indian city of Singapore,
some of the inhabitants are annually carried off
by tigers ; but the traveller can lie down in the
woods at night almost anywhere in North
America without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the
moon looks larger here than in Europe, prob-
ably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens
of America appear infinitely higher, and the
stars brighter, I trust that these facts are
symbolical of the height to which the philosophy
and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may
one day soar. At length, perchance, the im-
material heaven will appear as much higher to
the American mind, and the intimations that
star it as much brighter. For I believe that
climate does thus react on man — as there is
something in the mountain air that feeds the
spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to
greater perfection intellectually as well as
physically under these influences ? Or is it
unimportant how many foggy days there are in
his life ? I trust that we shall be more imagina-
tive, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher,
and more ethereal, as our sky — our understand-
ing more comprehensive and broader, like our
plains — our intellect generally on a grander

72 THE FOOTPATH WAY

scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers
and mountains and forests— and our hearts shall
even correspond in breadth and depth and
grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there
will appear to the traveller something, he knows
not what, of losta and glabra, of joyous and
serene, in our very faces. Else to what end
does the world go on, and why was America
discovered }

To Americans I hardly need to say :

" Westward the star of empire takes its way."

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to
think that Adam in paradise was more favour-
ably situated on the whole than the backwoods-
man in this country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not
confined to New England ; though we may be
estranged from the South, we sympathise with
the West. There is the home of the younger
sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to
the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to
be studying Hebrew ; it is more important t^r
understand even the slang of to-day.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama
of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the
Middle Ages. I floated down its historic
stream in something more than imagination,
under bridges built by the Romans, and re-

WALKING, AND THE WILD 73

paired by later heroes, past cities and castles
whose very names were music to my ears, and
each of which was the subject of a legend.
There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck
and Coblentz, which I knew only in history.
They were ruins that interested me chiefly.
There seemed to come up from its waters and
its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music
as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land.
I floated along under the spell of enchantment,
as if I had been transported to an heroic age,
and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after I went to see a panorama of the
Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the
river in the light of to-day, and saw the steam-
boats wooding up, counted the rising cities,
gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the
Indians moving west across the stream, and, as
before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked
up the Ohio and the Missouri and heard the
legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's Cliff*, —
still thinking more of the future than of the
past or present, — I saw that this was a Rhine
stream of a different kind ; that the foundations
of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous
bridges were yet to be thrown over the river ;
and I felt that this was the heroic age itself)
though we know it not, for the hero is
commonly the simplest and obscurest of

74 THE FOOTPATH WAY

The West of which I speak is but another
name for the Wild ; and what I have been pre-
paring to say iSj that in Wildness is the pre-
servation of the World. Every tree sends its
fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities
import it at any price. Men plough and sail
for it. From the forest and wilderness come
the tonics and barks which brace mankind.
Our ancestors were savages. The story of
Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf
is not a meaningless fable. The founders of
every State which has risen to eminence have
drawn their nourishment and vigour from a
similar wild source. It was because the
children of the Empire were not suckled by
the wolf that they were conquered and dis-
placed by the children of the Northern forests
who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow,
and in the night in which the corn grows.
We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or
arbor-vitae in our tea. There is a difference
between eating and drinking for strength and
from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly
devour the marrow of the koodoo and other
antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some
of our Northern Indians eat raw the marrow
of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other
parts, including the summits of the antlers, as
long as they are soft. And herein, perchance.

WALKING, AND THE WILD 75

they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris.
They get what usually goes to feed the fire.
This is probably better than stall-fed beef and
slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give
me a wildness whose glance no civilisation
can endure, — as if we lived on the marrow of
koodoos devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the
strain of the wood-thrush, to which I would
migrate, — wild lands where no settler has
squatted ; to which, methinks, I am already
acclimated.

The African hunter Cummings tells us that
the skin of the eland, as well as that of most
other antelopes just killed, emits the most
delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would
have every man so much like a wild antelope,
so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his
very person should thus sweetly advertise our
senses of his presence, and remind us of those
parts of Nature which he most haunts. I feel
no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper's
coat emits the odour of musquash even ; it is a
sweeter scent to me than that which commonly
exhales from the merchant's or the scholar's
garments. When I go into their wardrobes
and handle their vestments, I am reminded of
no grassy plains and flowery meads which they
have frequented, but of dusty merchants' ex-
changes and libraries rather.

76 THE FOOTPATH WAY

A tanned skin is something more than re-
speetable, and perhaps oHve is a fitter colour
than white for a man — a denizen of the woods.
" The pale white man ! " I do not wonder
that the African pitied him. Darwin the
naturalist says, " A white man bathing by the
side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached
by the gardener's art, compared with a fine,
dark green one, growing vigorously in the
open fields.''

Ben Jonson exclaims :

" How near to good is what is fair ! "

So I would say :

How near to good is what is wild\

Life consists with wildness. The most alive
is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its
presence refreshes him. One who pressed
forward incessantly and never rested from his
labours, who grew fast and made infinite
demands on life, would always find himself in
a new country or wilderness, and surrounded
by the raw material of life. He would be
climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive
forest trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns
and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities,
but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

WALKING, AND THE WILD 77

When, formerly, I have analysed my partiality
for some farm which I had contemplated pur-
chasing, I have frequently found that I was
attracted solely by a few square rods of imper-
meable and unfathomable bog — a natural sink
in one corner of it. That was the jewel which
dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence
from the swamps which surround my native
town than from the cultivated gardens in the
village. There are no richer parterres to my
eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda
{Cassandra calyculatcL) which cover these tender
places on the earth's surface. Botany cannot
go further than tell me the names of the
shrubs which grow there — the high-blueberry,
panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and
rhodora — all standing in the quaking sphagnum.
I often think that I should like to have my
house front on this mass of dull red bushes,
omitting other flower plots and borders, trans-
planted spruce and trim box, even gravelled
walks — to have this fertile spot under my
windows, not a few imported barrowfuls of
soil only to cover the sand which was thrown
out in digging the cellar. Why not put my
house, my parlour, behind this plot, instead
of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities,
that poor apology for a Nature and Art which
I call my front yard "^ It is an effort to clear
up and make a decent appearance when the

78 THE FOOTPATH WAY

carpenter and mason have departed, though
done as much for the passer-by as the dweller
within. The most tasteful front-yard fence
was never an agreeable object of study to me ;
the most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or
what not, soon wearied and disgusted me.
Bring your sills up to the very edge of the
swamp, then (though it may not be the best
place for a dry cellar), so that there be no
access on that side to citizens. Front yards
are not made to walk in, but, at most, through,
and you could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if
it were proposed to me to dwell in the neigh-
bourhood of the most beautiful garden that
ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal
swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.
How vain, then, have been all your labours,
citizens, for me !

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the
outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the
desert or the wilderness ! In the desert, pure
air and solitude compensate for want of mois-
ture and fertility. The traveller Burton says
of it — " Your morale improves ; you become
frank and cordial, hospitable and single-
minded. ... In the desert, spirituous liquors
excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoy-
ment in a mere animal existence." They who
have been travelling long on the steppes of

WALKING, AND THE WILD 79

Tartary say — **On re-entering cultivated lands,
the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civili-
sation oppressed and suffocated us ; the air
seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment
as if about to die of asphyxia." When I would
recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the
thickest and most interminable, and, to the
citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp
as a sacred place, — a sanctum satictorum. There
is the strength, the marrow of Nature. The
wild-wood covers the virgin mould, — and the
same soil is good for men and for trees. A
man's health requires as many acres of meadow
to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.
There are the strong meats on which he feeds.
A town is saved, not more by the righteous
men in it than by the woods and swamps that
surround it. A township where one primitive
forest waves above while another primitive
forest rots below, — such a town is fitted to
raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and
philosophers for the coming ages. In such a
soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest,
and out of such a wilderness comes the Re-
former eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally
the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or
resort to. So it is with man. A hundred
years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled
from our own woods. In the very aspect of

80 THE FOOTPATH WAY

those primitive and rugged trees there was,
methinksj a tanning principle which hardened
and consoHdated the fibres of men's thoughts.
Ah ! already I shudder for these comparatively
degenerate days of my native village, when
you cannot collect a load of bark of good
thickness ; and we no longer produce tar and
turpentine.

The civilised nations — Greece, Rome, Eng-
land— have been sustained by the primitive
forests which anciently rotted where they
stand. They survive as long as the soil is not
exhausted. Alas for human culture ! little is
to be expected of a nation when the vegetable
mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to
make manure of the bones of its fathers.
There the poet sustains himself merely by his
own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes
down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American " to
work the virgin soil," and that " agriculture
here already assumes proportions unknown
everywhere else." I think that the farmer
displaces the Indian even because he redeems
the meadow, and so makes himself st}76nger
and in some respects more natural* I was
surveying for a nmn the other day a single
straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods
long, through a swamp, at whose entrance
might have been written the words which

WALKING, AND THE WILD 81

Dante read over the entrance to the infernal
regions — '^ Leave all hope, ye that enter," —
that is, of ever getting out again ; where at
one time I saw my employer actually up to
his neck and swimming for his life in his
property, though it was still winter. He had
another similar swamp which I could not
survey at all, because it was completely under
water; and nevertheless, with regard to a
third swamp, which I did survey from a
distance, he remarked to me, true to his in-
stincts, that he would not part with it for any
consideration, on account of the mud which it
contained. And that man intends to put a
girdling ditch round the whole in the course
of forty months, and so redeem it by the
magic of his spade. I refer to him only as
the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our
most important victories, which should be
handed down as heirlooms from father to son,
are not the sword and the lance, but the
bush-whack, the turf cutter, the spade, and
the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many
a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of
many a hard-fought field. The very winds
blew the Indian's corn-field into the meadow,
and pointed out the way which he had not the
skill to follow. He had no better implement
with which to intrench himself in the land

82 THE FOOTPATH WAY

than a clamshell. But the farmer is armed
with plough and spade.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts
us. Dullness is but another name for tame-
ness. It is the uncivilised free and wild
thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the
Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in
the schools, that delights us. As the wild
duck is more swift and beautiful than the
tame, so is the wild — the mallard — thought,
which 'mid falling dews wings its way above
the fens. A truly good book is something as
natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccount-
ably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered
on the prairies of the West or in the jungles
of the East. Genius is a light which makes
the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash,
which perchance shatters the temple of know-
ledge itself, — and not a taper lighted at the
hearth-stone of the race, which pales before
the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the
minstrels to the Lake Poets — Chaucer and
Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,
included — breathes no quite fresh and in this
sense wild strain. It is an essentially tame
and civilised literature, reflecting Greece and
Rome. Her wilderness is a green wood, — her
wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of
genial love of Nature, but not so much of

WALKING, AND THE WILD 83

Nature herself. Her chronicles mform us
when her wild animals, but not when the wild
man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing,
poetry is another thing. The poet to-day,
notwithstanding all the discoveries of science,
and the accumulated learning of mankind,
enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expres-
sion to Nature ? He would be a poet who
could impress the winds and streams into his
service, to speak for him ; who nailed words to
their primitive senses, as farmers drive down
stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved;
who derived his words as often as he used
them — transplanted them to his page with
earth adhering to their roots; whose words
were so true and fresh and natural that they
would appear to expand like the buds at the
approach of spring, though they lay half-
smothered between two musty leaves in a
library, — ay, to bloom and bear fruit there,
after their kind, annually, for the faithful
reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which
adequately expresses this yearning for the
Wild. Approached from this side, the best
poetry is tame. I do not know where to find
in any literature, ancient or modern, any ac-
count which contents me of that Nature with

84 THE FOOTPATH WAY

which even 1 am acquainted. You will per-
ceive that I demand something which no
Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture,
in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer
to it than anything. How much more fertile
a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its
root in than English literature. Mythology is
the crop which the Old World bore before
its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and
imagination were affected with blight; and,
which it still bears, whenever its pristine
vigour is unabated. All other literatures en-
dure only as the elms which overshadow our
houses ; but this is like the great dragon-tree
of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and,
whether that does or not, will endure as long ;
for the decay of other literatures makes the
soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to
those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges,
the Nile, and the Rhine, having yielded their
crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys
of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the
St Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce.
Perchance, when, in the course of ages,
American liberty has become a fiction of the
past — as it is to some extent a fiction of the
present — the poets of the world will be in-
spired by American mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are

WALKING, AND THE WILD 85

not the less true, though they may not recom-
mend themselves to the sense which is most
common among Englishmen and Americans
to-day. It is not every truth that recommends
itself to the common sense. Nature has a
place for the wild clematis as well as for the
cabbage. Some expressions of truth are re-
miniscent,— others merely sensible, as the phrase
is, — others prophetic. Some forms of disease,
even, may prophesy forms of health. The
geologist has discovered that the figures of
serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other
fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their
prototypes in the forms of fossil species which
were extinct before man was created, and
hence ^'indicate a faint and shadowy know-
ledge of a previous state of organic existence."
The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on
an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise,
and the tortoise on a serpent ; and though it
may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not
be out of place here to state that a fossil
tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large
enough to support an elephant. I confess that
I am partial to these wild fancies, which tran-
scend the order of time and development.
They are the sublimest recreation of the intel-
lect. The partridge loves peas, but not those
that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free^

86 THE FOOTPATH WAY

There is something in a strain of music,
whether produced by an instrument or by the
human voice, — take the sound of a bugle in
a summer night for instance, — which by its
wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me
of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their
native forests. It is so much of their wildness
as I can understand. Give me for my friends
and neighbours wild men, not tame ones. The
wilderness of the savage is but a faint symbol
of the awful ferity with which good men and
lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals
reassert their native rights, — any evidence that
they have not wholly lost their original wild
habits and vigour; as when my neighbour's
cow breaks out of her pasture early in the
spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, grey
tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen
by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing
the Mississippi. This exploit confers some
dignity on the herd of my eyes — already
dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved
under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like
seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite
period. -^

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I
saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and
cows running about and frisking in unwieldy
sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They

WALKING, AND THE WILD 87

shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed
up and down a hill, and I perceived by their
horns, as well as by their activity, their relation
to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud
Whoa ! would have damped their ardour at
once, reduced them from venison to beef, and
stiffened their sides and sinews like the loco-
motive. Who but the Evil One has cried,
" Whoa ! " to mankind } Indeed, the life of
cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of
locomotiveness ; they move a side at a time,
and man, by his machinery, is meeting the
horse and the ox half way. Whatever part the
whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who
would ever think of a side of any of the supple
cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef .''

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be
broken before they can be made the slaves of
men, and that men themselves have some wild
oats still left to sow before they become sub-
missive members of society. Undoubtedly,
all men are not equally fit subjects for civilisa-
tion ; and because the majority, like dogs and
sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this
is no reason why the others should have their
natures broken that they may be reduced to
the same level. Men are in the main alike,
but they were made several in order that they
might be various. If a low use is to be served,
one man will do nearly or quite as well as

88 THE FOOTPATH WAY

another; if a high one, individual excellence
is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to
keep the wind away, but no other man could
serve so rare a use as the author of this illustra-
tion did. Confucius says — " The skins of the
tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned,
are as the skins of the dog and the sheep
tanned." But it is not the part of a true
culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to
make sheep ferocious ; and tanning their skins
for shoes is not the best use to which they can
be put.

When looking over a list of men's names in
a foreign language, as of military officers, or
of authors who have written on a particular
subject, I am reminded once more that there
is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff,
for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more
human than a whisker, and it may belong to
a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians
are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they
had been named by the child's rigmarole —
lery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan. I see in my
mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over
the earth, and to each the herdsman lias affixed
some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The
names of men are of course as cheap and as
meaningless as Bose and Tray, the names of
dogs.

t

WALKING, AND THE WILD 89

Methinks it would be some advantage to
philosophy if men were named merely in the
gross, as they are known. It would be neces-
sary only to know the genus, and perhaps the
race or variety, to know the individual. We
are not prepared to believe that every private
soldier in a Roman army had a name of his
own, because we have not supposed that he
had a character of his own. At present, our
only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy
who, from his peculiar energy, was called
" Buster " by his playmates, and this rightly
supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers
tell us that an Indian had no name given him
at first, but earned it, and his name was his
fame; and among some tribes he acquired
a new name with every new exploit. It is
pitiful when a man bears a name for conveni-
ence merely, who has earned neither name
nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinc-
tions for me, but still see men in herds for all
them. A familiar name cannot make a man
less strange to me. It may be given to a savage
who retains in secret his own wild title earned
in the woods. We have a wild savage in us,
and a savage name is perchance somewhere
recorded as ours. I see that my neighbour,
who bears the familiar epithet William, or
Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does

90 THE FOOTPATH WAY

not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or
aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem
to hear pronounced by some of his kin at
such a time his original wild name in some
jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother
of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such
beauty, and such affection for her children,
as the leopard ; and yet we are so early
weaned from her breast to society, to that
culture which is exclusively an interaction of
man on man — a sort of breeding in and in,
which produces at most a merely English
nobility, a civilisation destined to have a
speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men,
it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When
we should still be growing children, we are
already little men. Give me a culture which
imports much muck from the meadows, and
deepens the soil — not that which trusts to
heating manures and improved implements
and modes of culture only.

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have
heard of would grow faster, both intellectually
and physically, if, instead of sitting upr so very
late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

There may be an excess even of inform-
ing light. Niepce, a Frenchman, discovered
*' actinism," that power in the sun's rays

WALKING, AND THE WILD 91

which produces a chemical effect, — that
granite rocks, and stone structures, and
statues of metal, "are all alike destructively
acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and,
but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful,
would soon perish under the delicate touch
of the most subtile of the agencies of the
universe." But he observed that "those
bodies which underwent this change during
the daylight possessed the power of restoring
themselves to their original conditions during
the hours of night, when this excitement was
no longer influencing them." Hence it has
been inferred that "the hours of darkness
are as necessary to the creation as we know
night and sleep are to the organic kingdom."
Not even does the moon shine every night,
but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part
of man cultivated, any more than I would
have every acre of earth cultivated : part
will be tillage, but the greater part will be
meadow and forest, not only serving an
immediate use, but preparing a mould against
a distant future, by the annual decay of the
vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to
learn than those which Cadmus invented.
The Spaniards have a good term to express
this wild and dusky knowledge, — Gramdtica

92 THE FOOTPATH WAY

parda, tawny grammar, — a kind of mother-
wit derived from that same leopard to which
I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion
of Useful Knowledge. It is said that know-
ledge is power ; and the like. Methinks
there is equal need of a Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will
call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful
in a higher sense : for what is most of our
boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit
that we know something, which robs us of
the advantage of our actual ignorance .'*
What we call knowledge is often our positive
ignorance ; ignorance our negative knowledge.
By long years of patient industry and reading
of the newspapers — for what are the libraries
of science but files of newspapers ? — a man
accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in
his memory, and then when in some spring
of his life he saunters abroad into the Great
Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to
grass like a horse and leaves all his harness
behind in the stable. I would say to the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,
sometimes, — Go to grass. You have eaten hay
long enough. The spring has come with its
green crop. The very cows are driven to
their country pastures before the end of
May ; though I have heard of one unnatural

WALKING, AND THE WILD 93

farmer who kept his cow in the barn and
fed her on hay all the year round. So,
frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only
useful, but beautiful, — while his knowledge,
so called, is oftentimes worse than useless,
besides being ugly. Which is the best man
to deal with — he who knows nothing about
a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows
that he knows nothing, or he who really
knows something about it, but thinks that
he knows all ?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent ;
but my desire to bathe my head in atmo-
spheres unknown to my feet is perennial and
constant. The highest that we can attain
to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with
Intelligence. I do not know that this higher
knowledge amounts to anything more definite
than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden
revelation of the insufficiency of all that we
called Knowledge before — a discovery that
there are more things in heaven and earth
than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It
is the lighting up of the mist by the sun.
Man cannot know in any higher sense than
this, any more than he can look serenely and
with impunity in the face of the sun : '12s rt
vowi/ vv K€Lvov vory(7-€ts, — ^^You will not per-

94 THE FOOTPATH WAY

ceive that, as perceiving a particular thing,"
say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of
seeking after a law which we may obey. We
may study the laws of matter at and for our
convenience, but a successful life knows no
law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly,
that of a law which binds us where we did not
know before that we were bound. Live free,
child of the mist, — and with respect to know-
ledge we are all children of the mist. The
man who takes the liberty to live is superior
to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to
the law-maker. " That is active duty," says
the Vishnu Purana, "which is not for our
bondage ; that is knowledge which is for our
liberation : all other duty is good only unto
weariness ; all other knowledge is only the
cleverness of an artist."

It is remarkable how few events or crises
there are in our histories ; how little exercised
we have been in our minds ; how few experi-
ences we have had. I would fain be assured
that I am growing apace and rankly, though
my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,
— though it be with struggle through long,
dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom.
It would be well if all our lives were a
divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial

WALKING, AND THE WILD 95

comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others,
appear to have been exercised in their minds
more than we : they were subjected to a kind
of culture such as our district schools and
colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet,
though many may scream at his name, had a
good deal more to live for, ay, and to die for,
than they have commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits
one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad,
then indeed the cars go by without his hear-
ing them. But soon, by some inexorable law,
our life goes by and the cars return.

"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen.
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveller of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon ?"

While almost all men feel an attraction
drawing them to society, few are attracted
strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature
men appear to me for the most part, notwith-
standing their arts, lower than the animals.
It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the
case of the animals. How little appreciation
of the beauty of the landscape there is among
us ! We shall have to be told that the Greeks
called the world Koo-/xo?, Beauty, or Order,
but we do not see clearly why they did so,

96 THE FOOTPATH WAY

and we esteem it at best only a curious philo-
logical fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to
Nature I live a sort of border life, on the con-
fines of a world into which I make occasional
and transitional and transient forays only, and
my patriotism and allegiance to the State into
whose territories I seem to retreat are those
of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call
natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the
wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable,
but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the
causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast
and universal that we have never seen one
of her features. The walker in the familiar
fields which stretch around my native town
sometimes finds himself in another land than
is described in their owners' deeds, as it were
in some far-away field on the confines of the
actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases,
and the idea which the word Concord suggests
ceases to be suggested. These farms which
I have myself surveyed, these bounds which
I have set up, appear dimly still as through
a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix
them ; they fade from the surface of the glass ;
and the picture which the painter painted
stands out dimly from beneath. The world
with which we are commonly acquainted leaves
no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

WALKING, AND THE WILD 97

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other
afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up
the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its
golden rays straggled into the aisles of the
wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed
as if some ancient and altogether admirable
and shining family had settled there in that
part of the land called Concord, unknown to
me, — to whom the sun was servant, — who had
not gone into society in the village, — who had
not been called on. I saw their park, their
pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood,
in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines
furnished them with gables as they grew.
Their house was not obvious to vision ; the
trees grew through it. I do not know whether
I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or
not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams.
They have sons and daughters. They are
quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which
leads directly through their hall, does not in
the least put them out, — as the muddy bottom
of a pool is sometimes seen through the re-
flected skies. They never heard of Spaulding,
and do not know that he is their neighbour, —
notwithstanding 1 heard him whistle as he
drove his team through the house. Nothing
can equal the serenity of their lives. Their
coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it
painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics
G

98 THE FOOTPATH WAY

were in the tops of the trees. They are of
no politics. There was no noise of labour.
I did not perceive that they were weaving
or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind
lulled and hearing was done away, the finest
imaginable sweet musical hum, — as of a distant
hive in May, which perchance was the sound
of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts,
and no one without could see their work, for
their industry was not as in knots and excres-
cences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them.
They fade irrevocably out of my mind even
now while I speak and endeavour to recall
them, and recollect myself. It is only after
a long and serious effort to recollect my best
thoughts that I become again aware of their
cohabitancy. If it were not for such families
as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England
that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year.
Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it
would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each
growing man from year to year, for the grove
in our minds is laid waste, — sold ^o^ feed un-
necessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and
there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch
on. They no longer build nor breed with us.
In some more genial season, perchance, a faint

WALKING, AND THE WILD 99

shadow flits across the landscape of the mind^
cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal
or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are
unable to detect the substance of the thought
itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to
poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain
only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur.
Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate inert
you hear of!

We hug the earth — how rarely we mount !
Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little
more. We might climb a tree, at least. I
found my account in climbing a tree once.
It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill ;
and though I got well pitched, I was well paid
for it, for I discovered new mountains in the
horizon which I had never seen before, — so
much more of the earth and the heavens. I
might have walked about the foot of the tree
for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly
should never have seen them. But, above all,
I discovered around me, — it was near the end
of June, — on the ends of the topmost branches
only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like
blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine
looking heavenward. I carried straightway
to the village the topmost spire, and showed
it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets,
— for it was court-week, — and to farmers and
lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters.

100 THE FOOTPATH WAY

and not one had ever seen the like before, but
they wondered as at a star dropped down.
Tell of ancient architects finishing their works
on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the
lower and more visible parts ! Nature has
from the first expanded the minute blossoms
of the forest only toward the heavens, above
men's heads and unobserved by them. We
see only the flowers that are under our feet
in the meadows. The pines have developed
their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs
of the wood every summer for ages, as well
over the heads of Nature's red children as
of her white ones ; yet scarcely a farmer or
hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in
the present. He is blessed over all mortals
who loses no moment of the passing life in
remembering the past. Unless our philosophy
hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within
our horizon, it is belated. That sound com-
monly reminds us that we are growing rusty
and antique in our employments and habits
of thought. His philosophy comes dplvn to
a more recent time than ours. Ther^^ is some-
thing suggested by it that is a newer testament
— the gospel according to this moment. He
has not fallen astern ; he has got up early and
kept up early, and to be where he is to be in

WALKING, AND THE WILD 101

season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an
expression of the health and soundness of
Nature, a brag for all the world, — healthiness
as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of
the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of
time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws
are passed. W^ho has not betrayed his master
many times since last he heard the note }

The merit of this bird's strain is in its
freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer
can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but
where is he who can excite in us a pure morning
joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the
awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a
Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house
of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or
near, I think to myself, "There is one of us
well, at any rate," — and with a sudden gush
return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last
November. I was walking in a meadow, the
source of a small brook, when the sun at last,
just before setting, after a cold grey day,
reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the
softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the
dry grass and on the stems of the trees in
the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the
shrub-oaks on the hillside, while our shadows
stretched long over the meadow eastward, as

102 THE FOOTPATH WAY

if we were the only motes in its beams. It
was such a light as we could not have imagined
a moment before^ and the air also was so warm
and serene that nothing was wanting to make
a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected
that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never
to happen again, but that it would happen for
ever and ever an infinite number of evenings,
and cheer and reassure the latest child that
walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where
no house is visible, with all the glory and
splendour that it lavishes on cities, and, per-
chance, as it has never set before, — where
there is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have his
wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks
out from his cabin, and there is some little
black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh,
just beginning to meander, winding slowly
round a decaying stump. We walked in so
pure and bright a light, gilding the withered
grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright,
I thought I had never bathed in such a golden
flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The
west side of every wood and rising ground
gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and
the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle
herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till
one day the sun shall shine more brightly than

WALKING, AND THE WILD 103

ever he has done, shall perchance shine into
our minds and hearts, and light up our whole
lives with a great awakening light, as warm
and serene and golden as on a bank-side in
autumn.

H. D. Tkoreau.

A Young Tramp

A PLAN had occurred to me for passing
the night, which I was going to carry
into execution. This was, to lie be-
hind the wall at the back of ray old school,
in a corner where there used to be a haystack.
I imagined it would be a kind of company to
have the boys, and the bedroom where I used
to tell the stories, so near me : although the
boys would know nothing of my being there,
and the bedroom would yield me no shelter.

I had had a hard day's work, and was pretty
well jaded when I came climbing out, at last,
upon the level of Blackheath. It cost me
some trouble to find out Salem House ; but
I found it, and I found a haystack in the
corner, and I lay down by it ; having first
walked round the wall, and looked up at the
windows, and seen that all was dark and silent
within. Never shall I forget the lonely sensa-
tion of first lying down, without a roof above
my head.

Sleep came upon me as it came on many
other outcasts, against whom house-doors were
locked, and house-dogs barked, that night — and

104

A YOUNG TRAMP 105

I dreamed of lying on my old school-bed, talk-
ing to the boys in my room ; and found myself
sitting upright, with Steerforth's name upon
my lips, looking wildly at the stars that were
glistening and glimmering above me. When
I remembered where I was at that untimely
hour, a feeling stole upon me that made
me get up, afraid of I don't know what,
and walk about. But the faint glimmering of
the stars, and the pale light in the sky where
the day was coming, reassured me : and
my eyes being very heavy, I lay down again,
and slept — though with a knowledge in my
sleep that it was cold — until the warm beams
of the sun, and the ringing of the getting-up
bell at Salem House, awoke me. If I could
have hoped that Steerforth was there, I would
have lurked about until he came out alone ;
but I knew he must have left long since.
Traddles still remained, perhaps, but it was
very doubtful ; and I had not sufficient confi-
dence in his discretion or good luck, however
strong my reliance was on his good-nature, to
wish to trust him with my situation. So I
crept away from the wall as Mr Creakle's boys
were getting up, and struck into the long dusty
track which I had first known to be the Dover
Road when I was one of them, and when
I little expected that any eyes would ever see
me the wayfarer I was now, upon it.

106 THE FOOTPATH WAY

What a different Sunday morning from the
old Sunday morning at Yarmouth ! In due
time I heard the church-bells ringing, as I
plodded on ; and I met people who were going
to church ; and I passed a church or two where
the congregation were inside, and the sound
of singing came out into the sunshine, while
the beadle sat and cooled himself in the shade
of the porch, or stood beneath the yew-tree,
with his hand to his forehead, glowering at me
going by. But the peace and rest of the old
Sunday morning were on everything, except
me. That was the difference. I felt quite
wicked in my dirt and dust, with my tangled
hair. But for the quiet picture I had conjured
up, of my mother in her youth and beauty,
weeping by the fire, and my aunt relenting to
her, I hardly think I should have had courage
to go on until next day. But it always went
before me, and I followed.

I got, that Sunday, through three-and-twenty
miles on the straight road, though not very
easily, for I was new to that kind of toil. I
see myself, as evening closes in, coming over
the bridge at Rochester, footsore and tired,
and eating bread that I had bought for supper.
One or two little houses, with the notice,
'^Lodgings for Travellers," hanging out, had
tempted me ; but I was afraid of spending the
few pence I had, and was even more afraid of

A YOUNG TRAMP 107

the vicious looks of the trampers I had met or
overtaken. I sought no shelter, therefore, but
the sky ; and toiling into Chatham, — which, in
that night's aspect, is a mere dream of chalk,
and drawbridges, and mastless ships in a muddy
river, roofed like Noah's arks, — crept, at last,
upon a sort of grass-grown battery overhanging
a lane, where a sentry was walking to and fro.
Here I lay down, near a cannon ; and, happy
in the society of the sentry's footsteps, though
he knew no more of my being above him than
the boys at Salem House had known of my
lying by the wall, slept soundly until morning.
Charles Dickens ^ — "David Copperfield."

"BETTER THAN THE GIG!"

Mr Pecksniff's horse being regarded in the
light of a sacred animal, only to be driven by
him, the chief priest of that temple, or by some
person distinctly nominated for the time being
to that high office by himself, the two young
men agreed to walk to Salisbury; and so,
when the time came, they set off on foot ;
which was, after all, a better mode of travel-
ling than in the gig, as the weather was very
cold and very dry.

Better! A rare strong, hearty, healthy
walk — four statute miles an hour — preferable

108 THE FOOTPATH WAY

to that rumbling, tumbling, jolting, shaking,
scraping, creaking, villainous old gig ? Why,
the two things will not admit of comparison.
It is an insult to the walk, to set them side by
side. Where is an instance of a gig having
ever circulated a man's blood, unless when,
putting him in danger of his neck, it awakened
in his veins and in his ears, and all along his
spine, a tingling heat, much more peculiar
than agreeable ? When did a gig ever sharpen
anybody's wits and energies, unless it was
when the horse bolted, and, crashing madly
down a steep hill with a stone wall at the
bottom, his desperate circumstances suggested
to the only gentleman left inside, some novel
and unheard-of mode of dropping out behind ?
Better than the gig !

The air was cold, Tom ; so it was, there
was no denying it ; but would it have been
more genial in the gig ? The blacksmith's fire
burned very bright, and leaped up high, as
though it wanted men to warm ; but would it
have been less tempting, looked at from the
clammy cushions of a gig? The wind blew
keenly, nipping the features of the hardy
wight who fought his way along ; blinding
him with his own hair if he had enough of it,
and wintry dust if he hadn't ; stopped his
breath as though he had been soused in a
cold bath ; tearing aside his wrappings-up, and

A YOUNG TRAMP 109

whistling in the very marrow of his bones ;
but it would have done all this a hundred
times more fiercely to a man in a gig, wouldn't
it ? A fig for gigs !

Better than the gig ! When were travellers
by wheels and hoofs seen with such red-hot
cheeks as those? when were they so good-
humouredly and merrily bloused ? when did
their laughter ring upon the air, as they
turned them round, what time the stronger
gusts came sweeping up ; and, facing round
again as they passed by, dashed on, in such a
glow of ruddy health as nothing could keep
pace with, but the high spirits it engendered ?
Better than the gig ! Why, here is a man in
a gig coming the same way now. Look at
him as he passes his whip into his left hand,
chafes his numbed right fingers on his granite
leg, and beats those marble toes of his upon
the footboard. Ha, ha, ha I Who would
exchange this rapid hurry of the blood for
yonder stagnant misery, though its pace were
twenty miles for one }

Better than the gig! No man in a gig
could have such interest in the milestones.
No man in a gig could see, or feel, or think,
like merry users of their legs. How, as the
wind sweeps on, upon these breezy downs, it
tracks its flight in darkening ripples on the
grass, and smoothest shadows on the hills !

no THE FOOTPATH WAY

Look round and round upon this bare black
plain, and see even here, upon a winter's day,
how beautiful the shadows are ! Alas ! it is
the nature of their kind to be so. The
loveliest things in life, Tom, are but shadows ;
and they come and go, and change and fade
away, as rapidly as these !

Another mile, and then begins a fall of
snow, making the crow, who skims away so
close above the ground to shirk the wind, a
blot of ink upon the landscape. But though
it drives and drifts against them as they walk,
stiffening on their skirts, and freezing in the
lashes of their eyes, they wouldn't have it
fall more sparingly, no, not so much as by a
single flake, although they had to go a score
of miles. And, lo ! the towers of the Old
Cathedral rise before them, even now! and
by-and-bye they come rnto the sheltered
streets, made strangely silent by their white
carpet ; and so to the Inn for which they are
bound ; where they present such flushed and
burning faces to the cold waiter, and are so
brimful of vigour, that he almost feels assaulted
by their presence ; and, having nothing to
oppose to the attack (being fresh, or^ather
stale, from the blazing fire in the coffee-room),
is quite put out of his pale countenance.

Charles Dickens, — " Martin Chuzzlewit"

De Quincey leads the Simple
Life

THERE were already, even in those
days of 1802, numerous inns, erected
at reasonable distances from each
other, for the accommodation of tourists : and
no sort of disgrace attached in Wales, as too
generally upon the great roads of England, to
the pedestrian style of travelling. Indeed,
the majority of those whom I met as fellow-
tourists in the quiet little cottage-parlours of
the Welsh posting-houses were pedestrian tra-
vellers. All the way from Shrewsbury through
Llangollen, Llanrwst, Conway, Bangor, then
turning to the left at right angles through
Carnarvon, and so on to Dolgelly (the chief
town of Merionethshire), Tan-y-Bwlch, Harlech,
Barmouth, and through the sweet solitudes of
Cardiganshire, or turning back sharply towards
the English border through the gorgeous
wood scenery of Montgomeryshire — every-
where at intermitting distances of twelve to
sixteen miles, I found the most comfortable
inns. One feature indeed of repose in all
III

112 THE FOOTPATH WAY

this chain of solitary resting - houses — viz.,
the fact that none of them rose above two
storeys in height — was due to the modest
scale on which the travelling system of the
Principality had moulded itself in correspond-
ence to the calls of England, which then (but
be it remembered this then was in 1802, a year
of peace) threw a very small proportion of her
vast migratory population annually into this
sequestered channel. No huge Babylonian
centres of commerce towered into the clouds
on these sweet sylvan routes : no hurricanes of
haste, or fever-stricken armies of horses and
flying chariots, tormented the echoes in these
mountain recesses. And it has often struck
me that a world-wearied man, who sought for
the peace of monasteries separated from their
gloomy captivity — peace and silence such as
theirs combined with the large liberty of
nature — could not do better than revolve
amongst these modest inns in the five northern
Welsh counties of Denbigh, Montgomery, Car-
narvon, Merioneth, and Cardigan. Sleeping,
for instance, and breakfasting at Carnarvojl;
then, by an easy nine-mile walk, going for-
wards to dinner at Bangor, thence tii^Aber —
nine miles ; or to Llanberris ; and so on for
ever, accomplishing seventy to ninety or one
hundred miles in a week. This, upon actual
experiment, and for week after week, I found

DE QUINCEY 113

the most delightful of lives. Here was the
eternal motion of winds and rivers, or of the
Wandering Jew liberated from the persecution
which compelled him to move, and turned his
breezy freedom into a killing captivity.
Happier life I cannot imagine than this
vagrancy, if the weather were but tolerable,
through endless successions of changing
beauty, and towards evening a courteous
welcome in a pretty rustic home — that having
all the luxuries of a fine hotel (in particular
some luxuries ^ that are almost sacred to Alpine
regions), was at the same time liberated from
the inevitable accompaniments of such hotels
in great cities or at great travelling stations —
viz., the tumult and uproar.

Life on this model was but too delightful ;
and to myself especially, that am never
thoroughly in health unless when having
pedestrian exercise to the extent of fifteen
miles at the most, and eight to ten miles at
the least. Living thus, a man earned his
daily enjoyment. But what did it cost.^
About half a guinea a day : whilst my boyish
allowance was not a third of this. The
flagrant health, health boiling over in fiery
rapture, which ran along, side by side, with

^ But a luxury of another class, and quite peculiar to
Wales, was in those days (I hope in these) the Welsh
harp, in attendance at every inn.

H

114 THE FOOTPATH WAY

exercise on this scale^ whilst all the while
from morning to night I was inhaling
mountain air, soon passed into a hateful
scourge. Perquisites to servants and a bed
would have absorbed the whole of my weekly
guinea. My policy therefore was, if the
autumnal air was warm enough, to save this
expense of a bed and the chambermaid by
sleeping amongst ferns or furze upon a hill-
side ; and perhaps with a cloak of sufficient
weight as well as compass, or an Arab's
burnoose, this would have been no great
hardship. But then in the daytime what an
oppressive burden to carry ! So perhaps it
was as well that I had no cloak at all. I did,
however, for some weeks try the plan of carry-
ing a canvas tent manufactured by myself, and
not larger than an ordinary umbrella : but to
pitch this securely I found difficult; and on
windy nights it became a troublesome com-
panion. As winter drew near, this bivouack-
ing system became too dangerous to attempt.
Still one may bivouack decently, barring rain
and wind, up to the end of October. And I
counted, on the whole, that in a fortnight I
spent nine nights abroad. There_ are, as
perhaps the reader knows by experience, no
jaguars in Wales — nor pumas — nor anacondas
— nor (generally speaking) any Thugs. What
I feared most, but perhaps only through ignor-

DE QUINCEY 115

ance of zoology, was, lest, whilst my sleeping
face was upturned to the stars, some one of
the many little Brahminical-looking cows on
the Cambrian hills, one or other, might poach
her foot into the centre of my face. I do not
suppose any fixed hostility of that nature to
English faces in Welsh cows : but everywhere
I observe in the feminine mind something of
beautiful caprice, a floral exuberance of that
charming wilfulness which characterises our
dear human sisters I fear through all worlds.
Against Thugs I had Juvenal's license to be
careless in the emptiness of my pockets
(cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator). But I
fear that Juvenal's license will not always
hold water. There are people bent upon
cudgelling one who will persist in excusing
one's having nothing but a bad shilling in
one's purse, without reading in that Juvenalian
vacuitas any privilege or license of exemption
from the general fate of travellers that intrude
upon the solitude of robbers.

Thomas de Quincey.

A Resolution

I HAD long ago determined to leave
London as soon as the means should
be in my power, and, now that they
were, I determined to leave the Great City ;
yet I felt some reluctance to go. I would
fain have pursued the career of original
authorship which had just opened itself to
me, and have written other tales of adventure.
The bookseller had given me encouragement
enough to do so ; he had assured me that he
should be always happy to deal with me for
an article (that was the word) similar to the
one I had brought him, provided my terms
were moderate ; and the bookseller's wife, by
her complimentary language, had given me
yet more encouragement. But for some
months past I had been far from well, and
my original indisposition, brought on partly
by the peculiar atmosphere of the Big City,
partly by anxiety of mind, had b^en much
increased by the exertions which I had been
compelled to make during the last few days.
I felt that, were I to remain where I was,
I should die, or become a confirmed valetud-

ii6

A RESOLUTION 117

inarian. I would go forth into the country,
travelling on foot, and, by exercise and in-
haling pure air, endeavour to recover my
health, leaving my subsequent movements to
be determined by Providence.

But whither should I bend my course ?
Once or twice I thought of walking home
to the old town, stay some time with my
mother and my brother, and enjoy the
pleasant walks in the neighbourhood; but,
though I wished very much to see my
mother and my brother, and felt much dis-
posed to enjoy the said pleasant walks, the
old town was not exactly the place to which
I wished to go at this present juncture. I
was afraid the people would ask. Where are
your Northern Ballads ? Where are your
alliterative translations from Ab Gwilym — of
which you were always talking, and with
which you promised to astonish the world .^
Now, in the event of such interrogations,
what could I answer ? It is true I had com-
piled Newgate Lives and Trials, and had
written the life of Joseph Sell, but I was
afraid that the people of the old town would
scarcely consider these as equivalents for the
Northern Ballads and the songs of Ab Gwilym.
I would go forth and wander in any direction
but that of the old town.

But how one's sensibility on any particular

118 THE FOOTPATH WAY

point diminishes with time ; at present^ I enter
the old town perfectly indifferent as to what
the people may be thinking on the subject of
the songs and ballads. With respect to the
people themselves, whether, like my sensi-
bility, their curiosity has altogether evaporated,
or whether, which is at least equally probable,
they never entertained any, one thing is
certain, that never in a single instance have
they troubled me with any remarks on the
subject of the songs and ballads.

As it was my intention to travel on foot,
with a bundle and a stick, I despatched my
trunk containing some few clothes and books
to the old town. My preparations were soon
made ; in about three days I was in readiness
to start.

STONEHENGE

After standing still a minute or two, con-
sidering what I should do, I moved down what
appeared to be the street of a small straggling
town ; presently I passed by a church, which
rose indistinctly on my right hand ; anoiythere
was the rustling of foliage and the rtishing of
waters. I reached a bridge, beneath which a
small stream was running in the direction of
the south. I stopped and leaned over the
parapet, for I have always loved to look upon

STONEHENGE lip

streams, especially at the still hours. " What
stream is this, I wonder ? " said I, as I looked
down from the parapet into the water, which
whirled and gurgled below.

Leaving the bridge, I ascended a gentle
acclivity, and presently reached what appeared
to be a tract of raoory undulating ground. It
was now tolerably light, but there was a mist
or haze abroad which prevented my seeing
objects with much precision. I felt chill in
the damp air of the early morn, and walked
rapidly forward. In about half an hour I
arrived where the road divided into two, at an
angle or tongue of dark green sward. "To
the right or the left.''" said I, and forthwith
took, without knowing why, the left-hand road,
along which I proceeded about a hundred yards,
when, in the midst of the tongue of sward
formed by the two roads, collaterally with
myself, I perceived what I at first conceived to
be a small grove of blighted trunks of oaks,
barked and grey. I stood still for a moment,
and then, turning off the road, advanced slowly
towards it over the sward ; as I drew nearer, I
perceived that the objects which had attracted
my curiosity, and which formed a kind of circle,
were not trees, but immense upright stones.
A thrill pervaded my system ; just before me
were two, the mightiest of the whole, tall as
the stems of proud oaks, supporting on their

120

THE FOOTPATH WAY

tops a huge transverse stone, and forming a
wonderful doorway. I knew now where I was,
and, laying down my stick and bundle, and
taking off my hat, I advanced slowly, and cast
myself — it was folly, perhaps, but I could not
help what I did — cast myself, with my face on
the dewy earth, in the middle of the portal of
giants, beneath the transverse stone.

The spirit of Stonehenge was strong upon

And after I had remained with my face on
the ground for some time, I arose, placed my
hat on my head, and, taking up my stick and
bundle, wandered around the wondrous circle,
examining each individual stone, from the
greatest to the least ; and then, entering by
the great door, seated myself upon an immense
broad stone, one side of which was supported
by several small ones, and the other slanted
upon the earth ; and there in deep meditation,
I sat for an hour or two, till the sun shone in
my face above the tall stones of the eastern
side.

And as I still sat there, I heard the noise of
bells, and presently a large number of sheep
came browsing past the circle of stojies ; two
or three entered, and grazed upon what they
could find, and soon a man also entered the
circle at the northern side.

"Early here, sir," said the man, who was

STONEHENGE 121

tall, and dressed in a dark green slop, and had
all the appearance of a shepherd ; " a traveller,
I suppose ? "

"Yes," said I, " I am a traveller; are these
sheep yours ? "

" They are, sir ; that is, they are my master's.
A strange place this, sir," said he, looking at
the stones ; " ever here before ? "

" Never in body, frequently in mind."

" Heard of the stones, I suppose ; no wonder
— all the people of the plain talk of them."

"What do the people of the plain say of
them } "

"Why, they say — How did they ever come
here } "

"Do they not suppose them to have been
brought } "

" Who should have brought them } "

" I have read that they were brought by
many thousand men."

"Where from.''"

" Ireland."

" How did they bring them } "

" I don't know."

" And what did they bring them for } "

" To form a temple, perhaps."

" What is that ? "

" A place to worship God in."

" A strange place to worship God in."

"Why.?"

122 THE FOOTPATH WAY

"It has no roof."

" Yesj it has."

" Where .'' " said the man^ looking up.

" What do you see above you ? "

"The sky."

"Well.?"

"Well!"

" Have you anything to say ? "

" How did those stones come here ?"

" Are there other stones like these on the
plains ? " said I.

" None ; and yet there are plenty of strange
things on these downs."

"W^hat are they.?"

"Strange heaps, and barrows, and great
walls of earth built on the top of hills."

" Do the people of the plain wonder how
they came there.?"

"They do not."

"Why?"

" They were raised by hands."

" And these stones ? "

" How did they ever come here .?"

" I wonder whether they are here .?" said I.

" These stones ? " /

" Yes." ^

" So sure as the world/' said the man ; " and
as the world, they will stand as long."

" I wonder whether there is a world."

" What do you mean ? "

STONEHENGE 123

"An earth and sea, moon and stars, sheep
and men."

" Do you doubt it ? "

" Sometimes."

" I never heard it doubted before."

"It is impossible there should be a world."

"It ain't possible there shouldn't be a
world."

"Just so." At this moment a fine ewe,
attended by a lamb, rushed into the circle and
fondled the knees of the shepherd. " I sup-
pose you would not care to have some milk ? "
said the man.

" Why do you suppose so ? "

" Because, so be, there be no sheep, no milk,
you know ; and what there ben't is not worth
having."

" You could not have argued better," said I,
" that is, supposing you have argued ; with
respect to the milk you may do as you
please."

" Be still, Nanny," said the man ; and pro-
ducing a tin vessel from his scrip, he milked
the ewe into it. " Here is milk of the plains,
master," said the man, as he handed the vessel
to me.

" Where are those barrows and great walls
of earth you were speaking of.'' " said I, after I
had drunk some of the milk ; " are there any
near where we are ? "

124 THE FOOTPATH WAY

" Not within many miles ; the nearest is
yonder away/' said the shepherd, pointing
to the south-east. " It's a grand place,
that, but not like this ; quite different, and
from it you have a sight of the finest spire
in the world."

" I must go to it/' said I, and I drank the
remainder of the milk ; " yonder, you say."

" Yes, yonder ; but you cannot get to it in
that direction, the river lies between."

" What river .? "

"The Avon."

"Avon is British," said I.

"Yes," said the man, "we are all British
here."

"No, we are not," said I.

" What are we, then } "

"English."

" A' n't they one } "

" No."

" Who were the British ? "

"The men who are supposed to have wor-
shipped God in this place, and who raised
these stones."

" Where are they now } "

"Our forefathers slaughtered them^ spilled
their blood all about, especially in this neigh-
bourhood, destroyed their pleasant places, and
left not, to use their own words, one stone upon
another."

A PROSPECT 125

" Yes^ they did," said the shepherd, looking
aloft at the transverse stone.

" And it is well for them they did ; whenever
that stone, which English hands never raised,
is by English hands thrown down, woe, woe,
woe to the English race ; spare it, English !
Hengist spared it ! — Here is sixpence."

" I won't have it," said the man.

"Why not.?"

" You talk so prettily about these stones ;
you seem to know all about them."

" I never receive presents ; with respect to
the stones, I say with yourself. How did they
ever come here ?"

" How did they ever come here .'' " said the
shepherd.

A PROSPECT

Leaving the shepherd, I bent my way in the
direction pointed out by him as that in which
the most remarkable of the strange remains of
which he had spoken lay. I proceeded rapidly,
making my way over the downs covered with
coarse grass and fern ; with respect to the
river of which he had spoken, I reflected that,
either by wading or swimming, I could easily
transfer myself and what I bore to the opposite
side. On arriving at its banks, I found it a
beautiful stream, but shallow, with here and

126 THE FOOTPATH WAY

there a deep place, where the water ran dark
and still.

Always fond of the pure lymph, I undressed,
and plunged into one of these gulfs, from
which I emerged, my whole frame in a glow,
and tingling with delicious sensations. After
conveying my clothes and scanty baggage to
the farther side, I dressed, and then with
hurried steps bent my course in the direction
of some lofty ground ; I at length found myself
on a high road, leading over wide and arid
downs ; following the road for some miles
without seeing anything remarkable, I sup-
posed at length that I had taken the wrong
path, and wended on slowly and disconsolately
for some time, till, having nearly surmounted
a steep hill, I knew at once, from certain
appearances, that I was near the object of my
search. Turning to the right near the brow
of the hill, I proceeded along a path which
brought me to a causeway leading over a deep
ravine, and connecting the hill with another
which had once formed part of it, for the
ravine was evidently the work of art. I passed
over the causeway, and found myself in a kind
of gateway which admitted me into a square
space of many acres, surrounded on all sides
by mounds or ramparts of earth. Though I
had never been in such a place before, I knew
that I stood within the precincts of what had

A PROSPECT 127

been a Roman encampment, and one probably
of the largest size, for many thousand warriors
might have found room to perform their evolu-
tions in that space, in which corn was now
growing, the green ears waving in the morning
wind.

After I had gazed about the space for a time,
standing in the gateway formed by the mounds,
I clambered up the mound to the left hand,
and on the top of that mound I found myself
at a great altitude ; beneath, at the distance of
a mile, was a fair old city, situated amongst
verdant meadows, watered with streams, and
from the heart of that old city, from amidst
mighty trees, I beheld towering to the sky the
finest spire in the world.

After I had looked from the Roman rampart
for a long time, I hurried away, and, retracing
my steps along the causeway, regained the
road, and, passing over the brow of the hill,
descended to the city of the spire.

"ONE OF THE PLEASANT MOMENTS
OF LIFE"

After walking about a dozen miles, 1 came
to a town, where I rested for the night. The
next morning I set out again in the direction
of the north-west. I continued journeying

128 THE FOOTPATH WAY

for four days, my daily journeys varying from
twenty to twenty-five miles. During this time
nothing occurred to me worthy of any espe-
cial notice. The weather was brilliant^ and I
rapidly improved both in strength and spirits.
On the fifth day, about two o'clock, I arrived
at a small town. Feeling hungry, I entered a
decent-looking inn — within a kind of bar I
saw a huge, fat, landlord-looking person, with
a very pretty, smartly-dressed maiden. Ad-
dressing myself to the fat man, " House ! "
said I, " house ! Can I have dinner, house } "
" Young gentleman," said the huge fat land-
lord, " you are come at the right time ; dinner
will be taken up in a few minutes, and such a
dinner," he continued, rubbing his hands, "as
you will not see every day in these times."

"I am hot and dusty," said I, "and should
wish to cool my hands and face."

"Jenny!" said the huge landlord, with the
utmost gravity, " show the gentleman into
number seven, that he may wash his hands
and face." .

"By no means," said I, "I am a person of
primitive habits, and there is nothing like the
pump in weather like this." .

"Jenny !" said the landlord, with the same
gravity as before, " go with the young gentle-
man to the pump in the back kitchen, and take
a clean towel along with you."

A PLEASANT MOMENT 129

Thereupon the rosy-faced clean-looking
damsel went to a drawer, and producing a
large, thick, but snowy-white towel, she
nodded to me to follow her; whereupon I
followed Jenny through a long passage into
the back kitchen.

And at the end of the back kitchen there
stood a pump ; and going to it I placed my
hands beneath the spout, and said, " Pump,
Jenny"; and Jenny incontinently, without
laying down the towel, pumped with one
hand, and I washed and cooled my heated
hands.

And, when my hands were washed and
cooled, I took off my neckcloth, and unbutton-
ing my shirt collar, I placed my head beneath
the spout of the pump, and I iaid unto Jenny,
" Now, Jenny, lay down the towel, and pump
for your life,"

Thereupon Jenny, placing the towel on a
linen-horse, took the handle of the pump with
both hands and pumped over my head as hand-
maid had never pumped before ; so that the
water poured in torrents from my head, my
face, and my hair down upon the brick floor.

And after the lapse of somewhat more than
a minute, I called out with a half-strangled
voice, " Hold, Jenny ! " and Jenaiy desisted.
I stood for a few moments to recover my
breath, then taking the towel which Jenny

130 THE FOOTPATH WAY

proffered, I dried composedly my hands and
head, my face and hair; then, returning the
towel to Jenny, I gave a deep sigh and said,
"Surely this is one of the pleasant moments
of life."

George Borrow, — " Lavengro."

The Snowdon Ranger

I QUICKENED my steps, and soon came
up to the two individuals. One was an
elderly man, dressed in a smock frock,
and with a hairy cap on his head. The other
was much younger, wore a hat, and was dressed
in a coarse suit of blue, nearly new, and doubt-
less his Sunday's best. He was smoking a
pipe. I greeted them in English, and sat
down near them. They responded in the
same language, the younger man with con-
siderable civility and briskness, the other in
a tone of voice denoting some reserve.

'" May I ask the name of this lake } " said I,
addressing myself to the young man, who sat
between me and the elderly one.

"Its name is Llyn Cwellyn, sir," said he,
taking the pipe out of his mouth. "And a
fine lake it is."

" Plenty of fish in it .^ " I demanded.
" Plenty, sir ; plenty of trout and pike and
char."

" Is it deep } " said I.

"Near the shore it is shallow, sir, but in
the middle and near the other side it is

131

132 THE FOOTPATH WAY

deep, so deep that no one knows how deep
it is."

"What is the name/* said 1, "of the great
black mountain there on the other side ? "

"It is called Mynydd Mawr, or the Great
Mountain. Yonder rock, which bulks out
from it, down the lake yonder, and which you
passed as you came along, is called Castell
Cidwm, which means Wolf's rock or castle."

" Did a wolf ever live there .'^ " I demanded.

" Perhaps so," said the man, " for I have
heard say that there were wolves of old in
Wales."

" And what is the name of the beautiful hill
yonder, before us across the water ? "

"That, sir, is called Cairn Drws y Coed,"
said the man.

"The stone heap of the gate of the wood,"
said I.

" Are you Welsh, sir } " said the man.

" No," said I, " but I know something of the
language of Wales. I suppose you live in that
house ? "

"Not exactly, sir; my father-in-law here
lives in that house, and my wife with him.
I am a miner, and spend six days in ^fe week
at my mine, but every Sunday I come here,
and pass the day with my wife and him."

"And what profession does he follow.^"
said I ; "is he a fisherman ? "

THE SNOWDON RANGER 133

"Fisherman ! " said the elderly man con-
temptuously, "not I. I am the Snowdon
Ranger."

"And what is that ?" said I.

The elderly man tossed his head proudly,
and made no reply.

"A ranger means a guide, sir," said the
younger man — " my father-in-law is generally
termed the Snowdon Ranger because he is
a tip-top guide, and he has named the house
after him the Snowdon Ranger. He entertains
gentlemen in it who put themselves under his
guidance in order to ascend Snowdon and to
see the country."

"There is some difference in your profes-
sions," said I ; "he deals in heights, you
in depths; both, however, are break-necky
trades."

" I run more risk from gunpowder than any-
thing else," said the younger man. "I am
a slate-miner, and am continually blasting.
I have, however, had my falls. Are you
going far to-night, sir ? "

" I am going to Bethgelert," said I.

" A good six miles, sir, from here. Do you
come from Caernarvon ? "

" Farther than that," said I. " I come from
Bangor."

"' To-day, sir, and walking ? "

" To-day, and walking."

134 THE FOOTPATH WAY

" You must be rather tired, sir ; you came
along the valley very slowly."

"I am not in the slightest degree tired/'
said I ; " when I start from here, I shall put
on my best pace, and soon get to Bethgelert."

" Anybody can get along over level ground,"
said the old man, laconically.

" Not with equal swiftness," said I. " I do
assure you, friend, to be able to move at a
good swinging pace over level ground is some-
thing not to be sneezed at. Not," said I,
lifting up my voice, "that I would for a
moment compare walking on the level ground
to mountain ranging, pacing along the road to
springing up crags like a mountain goat, or
assert that even Powell himself, the first of
all road walkers, was entitled to so bright
a wreath of fame as the Snowdon Ranger."

"Won't you walk in, sir?" said the elderly
man.

" No, I thank you," said I ; " I prefer sitting
out here, gazing on the lake and the noble
mountains."

" I wish you would, sir," said the elderly
man, "and take a glass of something; I /Will
charge you nothing." _^

"Thank you," said I — "I am in want of
nothing, and shall presently start. Do many
people ascend Snowdon from your house } "

"Not so many as I could wish," said the

THE SNOWDON RANGER 135

ranger; ''^ people in general prefer ascending
Snowdon from that trumpery place Bethgelert ;
but those who do are fools — begging your
honour's pardon. The place to ascend Snow-
don from is my house. The way from my
house up Snowdon is wonderful for the
romantic scenery which it affords ; that from
Bethgelert can't be named in the same day
with it for scenery ; moreover, from my house
you may have the best guide in Wales ;
whereas the guides of Bethgelert — but I say
nothing. If your honour is bound for the
Wyddfa, as I suppose you are, you had better
start from my house to-morrow under my
guidance."

^* I have already been up the Wyddfa from
Llanberis/' said I, " and am now going through
Bethgelert to Llangollen, where my family
are ; were I going up Snowdon again, I should
most certainly start from your house under
your guidance, and were I not in a hurry
at present, I would certainly take up my
quarters here for a week, and eveiy day make
excursions with you into the recesses of Eryri.
I suppose you are acquainted with all the
secrets of the hills .'' "

" Trust the old ranger for that, your honour.
I would show your honour the black lake in
the frightful hollow, in which the fishes have
monstrous heads and little bodies, the lake on

136 THE FOOTPATH WAY

which neither swan, duck nor any kind of
wildfowl was ever seen to light. Then I
would show your honour the fountain of the
hopping creatures, where, where "

"Were you ever at that Wolfs crag, that
Castell y Cidwm ? " said I.

" Can't say I ever was, your honour. You
see it lies so close by, just across that lake,
that "

" You thought you could see it any day, and
so never went," said I. "Can't you tell me
whether there are any ruins upon it ? "

" I can't, your honour."

"I shouldn't wonder," said I, "if in old
times it was the stronghold of some robber-
chieftain ; cidwm in the old Welsh is frequently
applied to a ferocious man. Castell Cidwm,
I should think, rather ought to be translated
the robber's castle, than the wolfs rock. If
I ever come into these parts again, you and
I will visit it together, and see what kind of a
place it is. Now farewell ! It is getting late."
I then departed.

" What a nice gentleman ! " said the younger
man, when I was a few yards distant.

" I never saw a nicer gentleman," s^id the
old ranger.

I sped along, Snowdon on my left, the lake
on my right, and the tip of a mountain peak
right before me in the east. After a little

THE SNOWDON RANGER 137

time I looked back ; what a scene ! The silver
lake and the shadowy mountain over its
southern side looking now^ methought, very
much like Gibraltar. I lingered and lingered,
gazing and gazing, and at last only by an effort
tore myself away. The evening had now
become delightfully cool in this land of
wonders. On I sped, passing by two noisy
brooks coming from Snowdon to pay tribute to
the lake. And now I had left the lake and
the valley behind, and was ascending a hill.
As I gained its summit, up rose the moon to
cheer my way. In a little time, a wild stony
gorge confronted me, a stream ran down the
gorge with hollow roar, a bridge lay across it.
I asked a figure whom I saw standing by the
bridge the place's name. " Rhyd du " — the
black ford — I crossed the bridge. The voice
of the Methodist was yelling from a little
chapel on my left. I went to the door and
listened : " When the sinner takes hold of
God, God takes hold of the sinner." The
voice was frightfully hoarse. I passed on ;
night fell fast around me, and the mountain to
the south-east, towards which I was tending,
looked blackly grand. And now I came to
a milestone, on which I read with difficulty :
" Three miles to Bethgelert." The way for
some time had been upward, but now it was
downward. I reached a torrent, which, coming

138 THE FOOTPATH WAY

from the north-west, rushed under a bridge,
over which I passed. The torrent attended
me on my right hand the whole way to Beth-
gelert. The descent now became very rapid.
I passed a pine wood on my left, and proceeded
for more than two miles at a tremendous rate.
I then came to a wood — this wood was just
above Bethgelert — proceeding in the direction
of a black mountain, I found myself amongst
houses, at the bottom of a valley. I passed
over a bridge, and inquiring of some people,
whom I met, the way to the inn, was shown an
edifice brilliantly lighted up, which I entered.

OF UMBRELLAS

Wending my course to the north, I came to
the white bare spot which I had seen from
the moor, and which was in fact the top of a
considerable elevation over which the road
passed. Here I turned and looked at the hills
I had come across. There they stood, darkly
blue, a rain cloud, like ink, hanging over their
summits. O, the wild hills of Wales, the land
of old renown and of wonder, the land of
Arthur and Merlin.

The road now lay nearly due west. Rain
came on, but it was at my back, so I expanded
my umbrella, flung it over my shoulder and

THE SNOWDON RANGER 139

laughed. O, how a man laughs who has a
good umbrella when he has the rain at his
backj aye and over his head too^ and at all
times when it rains except when the rain is in
his face, when the umbrella is not of much
service. O, what a good friend to a man is an
umbrella in rain time, and likewise at many
other times. What need he fear if a wild
bull or a ferocious dog attacks him, provided
he has a good umbrella.'* he unfurls the
umbrella in the face of the bull or dog, and the
brute turns round quite scared, and runs away.
Or if a footpad asks him for his money, what
need he care provided he has an umbrella } he
threatens to dodge the ferrule into the ruffian's
eye, and the fellow starts back and says, " Lord,
sir ! I meant no harm. I never saw you before
in all my life. I merely meant a little fun."
Moreover, who doubts that you are a respectable
character provided you have an umbrella ? you
go into a public-house and call for a pot of beer,
and the publican puts it down before you with
one hand without holding out the other for the
money, for he sees that you have an umbrella
and consequently property. And what re-
spectable man, when you overtake him on the
way and speak to him, will refuse to hold
conversation with you, provided you have an
umbrella } No one. The respectable man
sees you have an umbrella and concludes that

THE FOOTPATH WAY

you do not intend to rob him, and with justice,
for robbers never carry umbrellas. O, a tent,
a shield, a lance and a voucher for character is
an umbrella. Amongst the very best friends
of man must be reckoned an umbrella.^

The way lay over dreary, moory hills : at
last it began to descend and I saw a valley
below me with a narrow river running through
it to which wooded hills sloped down ; far to
the west were blue mountains. The scene was
beautiful but melancholy ; the rain had passed
away, but a gloomy almost November sky was
above, and the mists of night were coming
down apace.

I crossed a bridge at the bottom of the
valley and presently saw a road branching to
the right. I paused, but after a little time
went straight forward. Gloomy woods were
on each side of me and night had come down.
Fear came upon me that I was not in the right
road, but I saw no house at which I could in-
quire, nor did I see a single individual for miles
of whom I could ask. At last I heard the sound
of hatchets in a dingle on my right, and catch-

^ As the umbrella is rather a hackneyed subject two or
three things will of course be found in the abovgjeulogium
on an umbrella which have been said by other folks on
that subject ; the writer, however, flatters himself that
in his eulogium on an umbrella two or three things will
also be found which have never been said by any one else
about an umbrella.

THE SNOWDON RANGER 141

ing a glimpse of a gate at the head of a path,
which led down into it, I got over it. After
descending some time I hallooed. The noise
of the hatchets ceased. I hallooed again, and
a voice cried in Welsh, " What do you want ? "
" To know the way to Bala," I replied. There
was no answer, but presently I heard steps, and
the figure of a man drew nigh half undis-
tinguishable in the darkness and saluted me.
I returned his salutation, and told him I
wanted to know the way to Bala. He told
me, and I found I had been going right. I
thanked him and regained the road. I sped
onward and in about half an hour saw some
houses, then a bridge, then a lake on my left,
which I recognised as the lake of Bala. I
skirted the end of it, and came to a street
cheerfully lighted up, and in a minute more
was in the White Lion Inn.

SUPPER— AND A MORNING VIEW

The sun was going down as I left the inn.
I recrossed the streamlet by means of the pole
and rail. The water was running with much
less violence than in the morning, and was
considerably lower. The evening was calm
and beautifully cool, with a slight tendency to
frost. I walked along with a bounding and

142

THE FOOTPATH WAY

elastic step, and never remember to have felt
more happy and cheerful.

I reached the hospice at about six o'clock,
a bright moon shining upon me, and found a
capital supper awaiting me, which I enjoyed
exceedingly.

How one enjoys one's supper at one's inn,
after a good day's walk, provided one has
the proud and glorious consciousness of being
able to pay one's reckoning on the morrow !

The morning of the sixth was bright and
glorious. As I looked from the window of the
upper sitting-room of the hospice the scene
which presented itself was wild and beautiful
to a degree. The oak-covered tops of the
volcanic crater were gilded with the brightest
sunshine, whilst the eastern side remained in
dark shade and the gap or narrow entrance to
the north in shadow yet darker, in the midst
of which shone the silver of the Rheidol cata-
ract. Should I live a hundred years I shall
never forget the wild fantastic beauty of that
morning scene.

George Borrow, — " Wild Wales."

Song of the Open Road

AFOOT and light-hearted I take to
the open road !
Healthy, free, the world before me.
The long brown path before me, leading
where-ever I choose !

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself
am good- fortune.

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no
more, need nothing.

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, queru-
lous criticisms.

Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth — that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to
them.

Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women — I carry them
with me wherever I go,

143

144 THE FOOTPATH WAY

I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of

them,
I am fiU'd with them, and I will fill them

in return.

You road I travel and look around ! I believe

you are not all that is here !
I believe that something unseen is also here.

Here is the profound lesson of reception,

neither preference or denial ;
The black with his woolly head, the felon, the

diseased, the illiterate person, are not denied.
The birth, the hasting after the physician, the

beggar's tramp, the drunkard's stagger, the

laughing party of mechanics.
The escaped youth, the rich person's carriage,

the fop, the eloping couple.
The early market-man, the hearse, the moving

of furniture into the tow^n, the return back

from the town.
They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none

can be interdicted.
None but are accepted, none but are dear to me.

You air that serves me with breath to^speak !

You objects that call from diffusion my mean-
ings and give them shape !

You light that wraps me and all things in
delicate equable showers !

SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD 145

You paths worn in the irregular hollows by

the road-sides !
I think you are latent with curious existences —

you are so dear to me.
You flagg'd walks of the cities ! you strong

curbs at the edges !
You ferries ! you planks and posts of wharves !

you timber-lined sides ! you distant ships !
You rows of houses ! you window-pierced

fa9ades ! you roofs !
You porches and entrances ! you copings and

iron guards !
You windows whose transparent shells might

expose so much !
You doors and ascending steps ! you arches !
You grey stones of interminable pavements !

you trodden crossings !
From all that has been near you I believe you

have imparted to yourselves, and now would

impart the same secretly to me.
From the living and the dead I think you

have peopled your impassive surfaces, and

the spirits thereof would be evident and

amicable with me.

The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
The picture alive, every part in its best

light.
The music falling in where it is wanted, and

stopping where it is not wanted,

K

146 THE FOOTPATH WAY

The cheerful voice of the public road — the
gay fresh sentiment of the road.

O highway I travel ! O public road ! Do you

say to me, Do not leave me ?
Do you say, Venture not? — If you leave me

you are lost ?
Do you say, I am already prepared — I am well

beaten and undenied — adhere to me ?

0 public road I I say back I am not afraid to
leave you — yet I love you,

You express me better than I can express

myself.
You shall be more to me than my poem.

1 think heroic deeds were all conceived in the

open air,
I think I could stop here myself and do

miracles,
I think whatever I meet on the road I shall

like, and whoever beholds me shall like me,
I think whoever I see must be happy.

From this hour, freedom !

From this hour I ordain myself loosed of li;a(iits

and imaginary lines ! ^,^^

Going where I list — my own master, total and

absolute.
Listening to others, considering well what

they say.

SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD 147

Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating.
Gently but with undeniable will divesting
myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of air.
The east and the west are mine, and the north
and the south are mine.

I am larger than I thought !

I did not know I held so much goodness !

All seems beautiful to me,

I can repeat over to men and women. You

have done such good to me, I would do the

same to you,
I will recruit for myself and you as I go,
I will scatter myself among men and women

as I go,
I will toss a new gladness and roughness

among them.
Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me.
Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed

and shall bless me.

Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear,

it would not amaze me.
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women

appear'd, it would not astonish me.

148 TttE FOOTPATH WAY

Now I see the secret of the making of the

best persons.
It is to grow in the open air, and eat and

sleep with the earth.

Here a great personal deed has room,

(Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the

whole race of men,
Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms

laws and mocks all authority and all argument

against it.)

Here is the test of wisdom.

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools.

Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it

to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of

proof, is its own proof.
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities

and is content.
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality

of things, and the excellence of things ;
Something there is in the float of the sight

of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet

not prove at all under the spacious clouds

and along the landscape and flowing currents.

SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD 149

Here is realization.

Here is a man tallied — he realizes here what

he has in him.
The past, the future, majesty, love — if they

are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

Only the kernel of every object nourishes ;
Where is he who tears off the husks for you

and me ?
Where is he that undoes stratagems and

envelopes for you and me ?

Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously

fashion'd, it is apropos ;
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved

by strangers ?
Do you know the talk of those turning eye-

baDs?

Here is the efflux of the soul.

The efflux of the soul comes from within

through embower'd gates, ever provoking

questions.
These yearnings why are they ? these thoughts

in the darkness why are they ?
Why are there men and women that while

they are nigh me the sunlight expands my

blood ?
Why when they leave me do my pennants of

joy sink flat and lank ?

150 THE FOOTPATH WAY

Why are there trees I never walk under but

large and melodious thoughts descend upon

me?
(I think they hang there winter and summer

on those trees and almost drop fruit as I

pass ;)
What is it I interchange so suddenly with

strangers ?
What with some driver as I ride on the seat

by his side ?
What with some fisherman drawing his seine

by the shore as I walk by and pause ?
What gives me to be free to a woman's and

man's good-will ? what gives them to be

free to mine ?

The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is
happiness.

I think it pervades the open air, waiting at
all times,

Now it flows unto us, we are rightly
charged.

Here rises the fluid and attaching character.

The fluid and attaching character is the fresh-
ness and sweetness of man and woman,

(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher
and sweeter every day out of the roots of
themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet
continually out of itself.)

I

SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD 151

Toward the fluid and attaching character

exudes the sweat of the love of young and

old,
From it falls distill'd the charm that mocks

beauty and attainments.
Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache

of contact.

Allons ! whoever you are come travel with me.
Travelling with me you find what never tires.

The earth never tires,

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at

first. Nature is rude and incomprehensible

at first.
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine

things well envelop'd,
I swear to you there are divine things more

beautiful than words can tell.

Allons ! we must not stop here.

However sweet these laid-up stores, however
convenient this dwelling we cannot remain
here.

However shelter' d this port and however calm
these waters we must not anchor here.

However welcome the hospitality that sur-
rounds us we are permitted to receive it but
a little while.

Allons ! the inducements shall be greater,
We will sail pathless and wild seas,

152 THE FOOTPATH WAY

We will go where winds blow, waves dash,
and the Yankee clipper speeds by under
full sail.

Allons ! with power, liberty, the earth, the
elements.

Health, defiance, gaiety, self-esteem, curiosity ;

Allons ! from all formulas !

From your formulas, O bat-eyed and material-
istic priests.

The stale cadaver blocks up the passage — the
burial waits no longer.

Allons ! yet take warning !

He travelling with me needs the best blood,

thews, endurance.
None may come to the trial till he or she

bring courage and health.
Come not here if you have already spent the

best of yourself,
Only those may come who come in sweet and

determined bodies.
No diseas'd person, no rum drinker or venereal

taint is permitted here.

(I and mine do not convince by arguments,

similes, rhymes.
We convince by our presence.)

Listen ! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer
rough new prizes.

SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD 153

These are the days that must happen to you :

You shall not heap up what is call'd riches :

You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you
earn or achieve.

You but arrive at the city to which you were
destin'd, you hardly settle yourself to satis-
faction before you are call'd by an irresist-
ible call to depart.

You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and
mockings of those who remain behind you.

What beckonings of love you receive you shall
only answer with passionate kisses of parting,

You shall not allow the hold of those who
spread their reach'd hands toward you.

Allons ! after the great Companions, and to

belong to them !
They too are on the road — they are the swift

and majestic men — they are the greatest

women,
Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas.
Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile

of land.
Habitues of many distant countries, habitues

of far distant dwellings.
Trusters of men and women, observers of cities,

solitary toilers,
Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms,

shells of the shore.

154

THE FOOTPATH WAY

Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides,

tender helpers of children, bearers of

children,
Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves,

lowerers-down of coffins,
Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the

years, the curious years each emerging from

that which preceded it,
Journeyers as with companions, namely their

own diverse phases,
Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized

baby-days,
Journeyers gaily with their own youth,

journeyers with their bearded and well-

grain'd manhood,
Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, un-

surpass'd, content,
Journeyers with their own sublime old age, of

manhood or womanhood.
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the

haughty breadth of the universe.
Old age, flowing free with the delicious

near-by freedom of death.

Allons ! to that which is endless as it ^was
beginningless, ^-^

To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of
nights.

To merge all in the travel they tend to, and
the days and nights they tend to,

SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD 155

Again to merge them in the start of superior

journeys,
To see nothing anywhere but what you may

reach it and pass it,
To conceive no time, however distant, but

what you may reach it and pass it.
To look up or down the road but it stretches

and waits for you, however long but it

stretches and waits for you.
To see no being, not God's or any, but you

also go thither.
To see no possession but may possess it,

enjoying all without labour or purchase,

abstracting the feast yet not abstracting

one particle of it.
To take the best of the farmer's farm and the

rich man's elegant villa, and the chaste

blessings of the well-married couple, and

the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens.
To take to your use out of the compact cities

as you pass through.
To carry buildings and streets with you after-
ward where-ever you go,
To gather the minds of men out of their

brains as you encounter them, to gather the

love out of their hearts.
To take your lovers on the road with you, for

all that you leave them behind you.
To know the universe itself as a road, as many

roads, as roads for travelling souls.

56

THE FOOTPATH WAY

All parts away for the progress of souls.
All religion, all solid things, arts, governments
— all that was or is apparent upon this globe
or any globe, falls into niches and corners
before the procession of souls along the
grand roads of the universe.

Of the progress of the souls of men and women
along the grand roads of the universe, all
other progress is the needed emblem and
sustenance.

Forever alive, forever forward.

Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad,

turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied,
Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men,

rejected by men.
They go ! they go ! I know that they go, but

I know not where they go.
But I know that they go toward the best —

toward something great.

Whoever you are, come forth ! or man or

woman come forth !
You must not stay sleeping and dallying there

in the house, though you built it, or though

it has been built for you.

Out of the dark confinement ! out from behind

the screen !
It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it.

Behold through you as bad as the rest,

SOiSTG OP THE OPEN UOAD 157

Through the laughter, dancing, dining, sup-
ping of people,

Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of
those wash'd and trimm'd faces.

Behold a secret silent loathing and despair.

No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to
hear the confession.

Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulk-
ing and hiding it goes.

Formless and wordless through the streets of
the cities, polite and bland in the parlours,

In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the
public assembly.

Home to the houses of men and women, at
the table, in the bed-room, everywhere.

Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form up-
right, death under the breast-bones, hell
under the skull-bones.

Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the
ribbons and artificial flowers.

Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a
syllable of itself.

Speaking of anything else, but never of itself.

Allons ! through struggles and wars !

The goal that was named cannot be counter-
manded.

Have the past struggles succeeded ?

What has succeeded.^ yourself.-* your nation.^
Nature ?

158 THE FOOTPATH WAY

Now understand me well — it is provided in
the essence of things that from any fruition
of success, no matter what, shall come forth
something to make a greater struggle
necessary.

My call is the call of the battle, I nourish

active rebellion,
He going with me must go well arm'd.
He going with me goes often with spare diet,

poverty, angry enemies, desertions.

Allons ! the road is before us !

It is safe — I have tried it — my own feet have

tried it well — be not detain' d!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten,

and the book on the shelf unopen'd !
Let the tools remain in the workshop ! let the

money remain unearn'd !
Let the school stand ! mind not the cry of the

teacher !
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit ! let the

lawyer plead in the court, and the judge

expound the law.

Camerado, I will give you my hand ! /

I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law ;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel

with me ?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we

live ? Walt Whitman.

Walking Tours

IT must not be imagined that a walking
tour, as some would have us fancy, is
merely a better or worse way of seeing
the country. There are many ways of seeing
landscape quite as good ; and none more vivid,
in spite of canting dilettantes, than from a
railway train. But landscape on a walking tour
is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the
brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the
picturesque, but of certain jolly humours — of
the hope and spirit with which the march
begins at morning, and the peace and spiritual
repletion of the evening's rest. He cannot
tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or
takes it off, with more delight. The excite-
ment of the departure puts him in key for that
of the arrival. Whatever he does is not only
a reward in itself, but will be further rewarded
in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to
pleasure in an endless chain. It is this that
so few can understand; they will either be
always lounging or always at five miles an
hour ; they do not play off the one against the
other, prepare all day for the evening, and all

159

i6o

THE FOOTPATH WAY

evening for the next day. And, above all, i
is here that your overwalker fails of compre-
hension. His heart rises against those who
drink their cura9oa in liqueur glasses, when he
himself can swill it in a brown John. He will
not believe that the flavour is more delicate
in the smaller dose. He will not believe that
to walk this unconscionable distance is merely
to stupefy and brutalise himself, and come to
his inn, at night, with a sort of frost on his five
wits, and a starless night of darkness in his
spirit. Not for him the mild luminous evening
of the temperate walker ! He has nothing left
of man but a physical need for bedtime and
a double nightcap ; and even his pipe, if he
be a smoker, will be savourless and disen-
chanted. It is the fate of such an one to take
twice as much trouble as is needed to obtain
happiness, and miss the happiness in the end ;
he is the man of the proverb, in short, who
goes further and fares worse.

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour
should be gone upon alone. If you go in
a company, or even in pairs, it is no longer
a walking tour in anything but name; it is
something else and more in the nature of a
picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon
alone, because freedom is of the essence ; be-
cause you should be able to stop and go on, and
follow this way or that, as the freak takes you ;

WALKING TOURS l6l

and because you must have your own pace, and
neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor
mince in time with a girl. And then you
must be open to all impressions and let your
thoughts take colour from what you see. You
should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon.
"I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of
walking and talking at the same time. When
I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like
the country," which is the gist of all that can
be said upon the matter. There should be no
cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the
meditative silence of the morning. And so
long as a man is reasoning he cannot surrender
himself to that fine intoxication that comes
of much motion in the open air, that begins
in a sort of dazzle and sluggishness of the
brain, and ends in a peace that passes com-
prehension.

During the first day or so of any tour there
are moments of bitterness, when the traveller
feels more than coldly towards his knapsack,
when he is half in a mind to throw it bodily
over the hedge and, like Christian on a similar
occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing."
And yet it soon acquires a property of easiness.
It becomes magnetic ; the spirit of the journey
enters into it. And no sooner have you passed
the straps over your shoulder than the lees of
sleep are cleared from you, you pull yourself
L

162 THE FOOTPATH WAY

together with a shake^ and fall at once into
your stride. And surely, of all possible moods,
this, in which a man takes the road, is the
best. Of course, if he will keep thinking of
his anxieties, if he will open the merchant
Abudah's chest and walk arm in arm with the
hag — why, wherever he is, and whether he
walk fast or slow, the chances are that he will
not be happy. And so much the more shame
to himself! There are perhaps thirty men
setting forth at that same hour, and I would
lay a large wager there is not another dull
face among the thirty. It would be a fine
thing to follow, in a coat of darkness, one
after another of these wayfarers, some summer
morning, for the first few miles upon the road.
This one, who walks fast, with a keen look in
his eyes, is all concentrated in his own mind ;
he is up at his loom, weaving and weaving, to
set the landscape to words. This one peers
about, as he goes, among the grasses ; he waits
by the canal to watch the dragon-flies; he
leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot
look enough upon the complacent kine. And
here comes another talking, laughing, and
gesticulating to himself His face changes
from time to time, as indignation flashes from
his eyes or anger clouds his forehead. He is
composing articles, delivering orations, and
conducting the most impassioned interviews.

3

WALKING TOURS l63

by the way. A little farther on, and it is as
like as not he will begin to sing. And well
for him, supposing him to be no great master
in that art, if he stumble across no stolid
peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion,
I scarcely know which is the more troubled, or
whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of
your troubadour or the unfeigned alarm of
your clown. A sedentary population, accus-
tomed, besides, to the strange mechanical
bearing of the common tramp, can in no wise
explain to itself the gaiety of these passers-by.
I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway
lunatic, because, although a full-grown person
with a red beard, he skipped as he went like
a child. And you would be astonished if
I were to tell you all the grave and learned
heads who have confessed to me that, when
on walking tours, they sang — and sang very
ill — and had a pair of red ears when, as de-
scribed above, the inauspicious peasant plumped
into their arras from round a corner. And
here, lest you think I am exaggerating, is
Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay " On
going a Journey," which is so good that there
should be a tax levied on all who have not
read it : —

" Give me the clear blue sky over my head,"
says he, " and the green turf beneath my feet,
a winding road before me, and a three hours'

164 THE FOOTPATH WAY

inarch to dinner — and then to thinking ! It is
hard if I cannot start some game on these
lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing
for joy."

Bravo ! After that adventure of my friend
with the policeman, you would not have cared,
would you, to publish that in the first person }
But we have no bravery nowadays, and, even
in books, must all pretend to be as dull and
foolish as our neighbours. It was not so with
Hazlitt. And notice how learned he is (as,
indeed, throughout the essay) in the theory of
walking tours. He is none of your athletic
men in purple stockings, who walk their fifty
miles a day: three hours' march is his ideal.
And then he must have a winding road, the
epicure !

Yet there is one thing I object to in these
words of his, one thing in the great master's
practice that seems to me not wholly wise.
I do not approve of that leaping and running.
Both of these hurry the respiration ; they both
shake up the brain out of its glorious open-air
confusion; and they both break the pace.
Uneven walking is not so agreeable to the
body, and it distracts and irritates th€ mind.
Whereas, when once you have fallen into an
equable stride, it requires no conscious thought
from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents
you from thinking earnestly of anything else.

WALKING TOURS l65

Like knittings like the work of a copying clerk,
it gradually neutralises and sets to sleep the
serious activity of the mind. We can think of
this or that, lightly and laughingly, as a child
thinks, or as we think in a morning doze ; we
can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and
trifle in a thousand ways with words or rhymes ;
but when it comes to honest work, when we
come to gather ourselves together for an effort,
we may sound the trumpet as loud and long as
we please; the great barons of the mind will
not rally to the standard, but sit, each one, at
home, warming his hands over his own fire and
brooding on his own private thought !

In the course of a day's walk, you see, there
is much variance in the mood. From the
exhilaration of the start, to the happy phlegm
of the arrival, the change is certainly great.
As the day goes on, the traveller moves from
the one extreme towards the other. He
becomes more and more incorporated with
the material landscape, and the open-air
drunkenness grows upon him with great
strides, until he posts along the road, and
sees everything about him, as in a cheerful
dream. The first is certainly brighter, but
the second stage is the more peaceful. A
man does not make so many articles towards
the end, nor does he laugh aloud; but the
purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical

166

THE FOOTPATH WAY

well-being, the delight of every inhalation, of
every time the muscles tighten down the
thigh, console him for the absence of the
others, and bring him to his destination still
content.

Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs.
You come to a milestone on a hill, or some
place where deep ways meet under trees;
and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit
to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink into
yourself, and the birds come round and look
at you, and your smoke dissipates upon the
afternoon under the blue dome of heaven ;
and the sun lies warm upon your feet, and
the cool air visits your neck and turns aside
your open shirt. If you are not happy, you
must have an evil conscience. You may dally
as long as you like by the roadside. It is
almost as if the millennium were arrived,
when we shall throw our clocks and watches
over the housetop, and remember time and
seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a
lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for
ever. You have no idea, unless you have
tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's
day, that you measure out only by hunger,
and bring to an end only when you are
drowsy. I know a village where there are
hardly any clocks, where no one knows more
of the days of the week than by a sort of

WALKING TOURS 167

instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where
only one person can tell you the day of the
month, and she is generally wrong ; and if
people were aware how slow Time journeyed
in that village, and what armfuls of spare
hours he gives, over and above the bargain,
to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would
be a stampede out of London, Liverpool, Paris,
and a variety of large towns, where the clocks
lose their heads, and shake the hours out each
one faster than the other, as though they
were all in a wager. And all these foolish
pilgrims would each bring his own misery
along with him, in a watch-pocket ! It is to
be noticed, there were no clocks and watches
in the much-vaunted days before the flood.
It follows, of course, there were no appoint-
ments, and punctuality was not yet thought
upon. " Though ye take from a covetous man
all his treasure," says Milton, " he has yet one
jewel left ; ye cannot deprive him of his
covetousness." And so I would say of a
modern man of business, you may do what
you will for him, put him in Eden, give him
the elixir of life — he has still a flaw at heart,
he still has his business habits. Now, there
is no time when business habits are more
mitigated than on a walking tour. And so
during these halts, as I say, you will feel
almost free.

168 THE FOOTPATH WAY

But it is at night, and after dinner, that the
best hour comes. There are no such pipes to
be smoked as those that follow a good day's
march ; the flavour of the tobacco is a thing
to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic,
so full and so fine. If you wind up the
evening with grog, you will own there was
never such grog ; at every sip a jocund
tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and
sits easily in your heart. If you read a book
— and you will never do so save by fits and
starts — you find the language strangely racy
and harmonious ; words take a new meaning ;
single sentences possess the ear for half an
hour together; and the writer endears him-
self to you, at every page, by the nicest
coincidence of sentiment. It seems as if it
were a book you had written yourself in a
dream. To all we have read on such occasions
we look back with special favour. " It was on
the 10th of April 1798," says Hazlitt, with
amorous precision, "that I sat down to a
volume of the new Heloise, at the Inn at
Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a
cold chicken." I should wish to quote more,
for though we are mighty fine fellows now-
adays, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And,
talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt' s essays
would be a capital pocket-book on such a
journey ; so would a volume of Heine's songs ;

WALKING TOURS 169

and for Tristram Shandy I can pledge a fair
experience.

If the evening be fine and warm, there is
nothing better in life than to lounge before
the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the
parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds
and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever,
that you taste joviality to the full significance
of that audacious word. Your muscles are so
agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so
strong and so idle, that whether you move
or sit still, whatever you do is done with
pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You
fall in talk with any one, wise or foolish,
drunk or sober. And it seems as if a hot
walk purged you, more than of anything else^
of all narrowness and pride, and left curiosity
to play its part freely, as in a child or a man
of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies,
to watch provincial humours develop them-
selves before you, now as a laughable farce,
and now grave and beautiful like an old
tale.

Or perhaps you are left to your own
company for the night, and surly weather
imprisons you by the fire. You may remember
how Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells
upon the hours when he has been "happy
thinking." It is a phrase that may well per-
plex a poor modern girt about on every side

170

THE FOOTPATH WAY

by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at
night, by flaming dial-plates. For we are
all so busy, and have so many far-ofF projects
to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into
solid, habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that
we can find no time for pleasure trips into the
Land of Thought and among the Hills of
Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we
must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded
hands ; and a changed world for most of us,
when we find we can pass the hours without
discontent, and be happy thinking. We are
in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to
be gathering gear, to make our voice audible
a moment in the derisive silence of eternity,
that we forget that one thing, of which these
are but the parts — namely, to live. We fall
in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro
upon the earth like frightened sheep. And
now you are to ask yourself if, when all is
done, you would not have been better to sit
by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.
To sit still and contemplate, — to remember
the faces of women without desire, to be
pleased by the great deeds of men without
envy, to be everything and every:vrfiere in
sympathy, and yet content to remain where
and what you are — is not this to know both
wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happi-
ness ? After all, it is not they who carry

WALKING TOURS 171

flags, but they who look upon it from a
private chamber, who have the fun of the
procession. And once you are at that, you
are in the very humour of all social heresy.
It is no time for shuffling, or for big empty
words. If you ask yourself what you mean
by fame, riches, or learning, the answer is
far to seek ; and you go back into that
kingdom of light imaginations, which seem
so vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring
after wealth, and so momentous to those who
are stricken with the disproportions of the
world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars,
cannot stop to split differences between
two degrees of the infinitesimally small,
such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman
Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick's
end.

You lean from the window, your last pipe
reeking whitely into the darkness, your body-
full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned
in the seventh circle of content; when
suddenly the mood changes, the weather-
cock goes about, and you ask yourself one
question more : whether, for the interval,
you have been the wisest philosopher or
the most egregious of donkeys.^ Human
experience is not yet able to reply ; but
at least you have had a fine moment, and
looked down upon all the kingdoms of the

THE FOOTPATH WAY

earth. And whether it was wise or foolish,
to-morrow's travel will carry you, body and
mind, into some different parish of the
infinite.

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Sylvanus Urban discovers
a Good Brew

IT must be nearly thirty years ago, long
before the days of bicycles and motors,
since Sylvanus Urban, then but a boy,
passed over it. He had started from Chep-
stow on a solitary walking tour, and was soon
caught in a rattling thunderstorm on the
WyndclifF. Tintern Abbey and Raglan Castle
are fresh in his memory to-day. A mile or
two out of Monmouth he came upon some
excellent nutty-hearted ale, that George Borrow
would have immortalised. As he pursued his
way to Raglan Castle he pondered on the ale —
"this way and that dividing the swift mind"
— until at length, in despair of meeting an
equal brew, he turned back again and had
another tankard. Heavens, what days were
those ! In his pack he carried the Essays
of Elia and read them in an old inn at Llan-
dovery, where the gracious hostess lighted in
his honour tall wax candles fit to stand before
an altar. After leaving Llandovery, he lost his
way among the Caermarthenshire hills, and

173

174

THE FOOTPATH WAY

was in very poor plight with hunger and
fatigue when he reached the white-washed
walls of Tregaron. At Harlech he rested for
a couple of days, and then covered the way to
Beddgelert — twenty miles, if he remembers
rightly — at a spanking pace ; proceeding in
the late afternoon to climb Snowdon, and
arriving at Llanberis an hour or so before
midnight. Back to London, every inch of the
way, walked the young Sylvanus. He indulges
the hope that he may yet shoulder his pack
again.

Gentleman's Magazine.

Minchmoor

Now that everybody is out of town,
and every place in the guide-books
is as well known as Princes Street
or Pall-Mall, it is something to discover a hill
everybody has not been to the top of, and
which is not in Black. Such a hill is Minchmoor ,
nearly three times as high as Arthur s Seat,
and lying between Tweed and Yarrow.

The best way to ascend it is from Traquair.
You go up the wild old Selkirk road, which
passes almost right over the summit, and by
which Montrose and his cavaliers fled from
Philiphaugh, where Sir Walter's mother re-
membered crossing, when a girl, in a coach-
and-six, on her way to a ball at Peebles, several
footmen marching on either side of the carriage
to prop it up or drag it out of the moss haggs ;
and where, to our amazement, we learned
that the Duchess of Buccleuch had lately
driven her ponies. Before this we had passed
the grey, old-world entrance to Traquair House,
and looked down its grassy and untrod avenue
to the pallid, forlorn mansion, stricken all
o'er with eld, and noticed the wrought-iron

175

176 THE FOOTPATH WAY

gate embedded in a foot deep and more of
soil, never having opened since the '45. There
are the huge Bradwardine bears on each side —
most grotesque supporters — with a superfluity
of ferocity and canine teeth. The whole place,
like the family whose it has been, seems dying
out — everjrthing subdued to settled desolation.
The old race, the old religion, the gaunt old
house, with its small, deep, comfortless windows,
the decaying trees, the stillness about the
doors, the grass overrunning everything, nature
reinstating herself in her quiet way — all this
makes the place look as strange and pitiful
among its fellows in the vale as would the
Earl who built it three hundred years ago if
we met him tottering along our way in the
faded dress of his youth; but it -looks the
Earl's house still, and has a dignity of its own.
We soon found the Minchmoor road, and
took at once to the hill, the ascent being, as
often is with other ascents in this world,
steepest at first. Nothing could be more
beautiful than the view as we ascended, and
got a look of the " eye-sweet " Tweed hills,
and their "silver stream." It was one of the
five or six good days of this summer---^in early
morning, " soft " and doubtful ; but the mists
drawing up, and now the noble, tawny hills
were dappled with gleams and shadows —
"Sunbeams upon distant hills gliding apace" —

I

MINCHMOOR 177

the best sort of day for mountain scenery —
that ripple of light and shadow brings out the
forms and the depths of the hills far better
than a cloudless sky; and the horizon is
generally wider.

Before us and far away was the round flat
head of Minchmoor^ with a dark, rich bloom
on it from the thick, short heather — the hills
around being green. Near the top, on the
Tweed side, its waters trotting away cheerily
to the glen at Bold, is the famous Cheese Well
— always full, never overflowing. Here every
traveller — Duchess, shepherd, or houseless
mugger — stops, rests, and is thankful ; doubtless
so did Montrose, poor fellow, and his young
nobles and their jaded steeds, on their scurry
from Lesly and his Dragoons. It is called the
Cheese Well from those who rest there dropping
in bits of their provisions, as votive offerings
to the fairies whose especial haunt this moun-
tain was. After our rest and drink, we left the
road and made for the top. When there we
were well rewarded. The great round-backed,
kindly, solemn hills of Tweed, Yarrow, and
Ettrick lay all about like sleeping mastiffs —
too plain to be grand, too ample and beautiful
to be commonplace.

There, to the north-east, is the place —
Williamhope ridge — where Sir Walter Scott
bade farewell to his heroic friend Mungo Park.

178 THE FOOTPATH WAY

They had come up from Ashestiel, where Scott
then lived, and where Marmion was written
and its delightful epistles inspired — where he
passed the happiest part of his life — leaving
it, as Hogg said, " for gude an' a'" ; for his
fatal " dreams about his cottage " were now
begun. He was to have " a hundred acres,
two spare bed-rooms, with dressing rooms,
each of which will on a pinch have a couch-
bed." We all know what the dream, and the
cottage, and the hundred acres came to — the
ugly Abbotsford ; the over-burdened, shattered
brain driven wild, and the end, death, and
madness. Well, it was on the ridge that
the two friends — each romantic, but in such
different ways — parted never to meet again.
There is the ditch Park's horse stumbled over
and all but fell. " I am afraid, Mungo, that's
a bad omen," said the Sheriff; to which he
answered, with a bright smile on his handsome,
fearless face — " Freits (omens) follow those
who look to them." With this expression, he
struck the spurs into his horse, and Scott
never saw him again. He had not long been
married to a lovely and much-loved woman,
and had been speaking to Scott abont his new
African scheme, and how he meant to tell his
family he had some business in Edinburgh —
send them his blessing, and be off — alas ! never
to return ! Scott used to say, when speaking

MINCHMOOR 179

of this partiiigj " I stood and looked back^ but
he did not." A more memorable place for two
such men to part in would not easily be found.
Where we are standing is the spot Scott
speaks of when writing to Joanna Baillie about
her new tragedies — " Were it possible for me
to hasten the treat I expect in such a com-
position with you, I would promise to read the
volume at the silence of nooTiday upon the top of
Minchmoor. The hour is allowed, by those
skilful in demonology, to he as full of witching
as midnight itself; and I assure you I have
felt really oppressed with a sort of fearful lone-
liness when looking around the naked towering
ridges of desolate barrenness, which is all the
eye takes in from the top of such a mountain,
the patches of cultivation being hidden in the
little glens, or only appearing to make one
feel how feeble and ineffectual man has been
to contend with the genius of the soil. It is
in such a scene that the unknown and gifted
author of Albania places the superstition which
consists in hearing the noise of a chase, the
baying of the hounds, the throttling sobs of
the deer, the wild hollos of the huntsmen, and
the * hoof thick beating on the hollow hill.*
I have often repeated his verses with some
sensations of awe, in this place." The lines —
and they are noble, and must have sounded
wonderful with his voice and look — are as

180 THE FOOTPATH WAY

follows. Can no one tell us anything more
of their author ? —

'* There oft is heard, at midnight, or at noon,
Beginning faint, but rising still more loud,
And nearer, voice of hunters, and of hounds ;
And horns, hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen !
Forthwith the hubbub multiplies ; the gale
Labours with wilder shrieks, and rifer din
Of hot pursuit ; the broken cry of deer
Mangled by throttling dogs ; the shouts of men,
And hoofs thick beating on the hollow hill.
Sudden the grazing heifer in the vale
Starts at the noise, and both the herdman's ears
Tingle with inward dread — aghast he eyes
The mountain's height, and all the ridges round,
Yet not one trace of living wight discerns.
Nor knows, o'erawed and trembling as he stands,
To what or whom he owes his idle fear —
To ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend ;
But wonders, and no end of wondering finds."

We listened for the hunt^ but could only hear
the wind sobbing from the blind "Hopes." ^

The view from the top reaches from the
huge Harcstane Broadlaw — nearly as high as
Ben Lomond — whose top is as flat as a table,
and would make a race-course of two miles, and
where the clouds are still brooding, to the
Cheviot ; and from the Maiden Paps in Liddes-
dale, and that wild huddle of hills at Moss

^ The native word for hollows in the hills : thus,
Dryhope, Gameshope, Chapelhope, &c.

MINCHMOOR 181

Paul, to Dimse Law, and the weird Lammer-
moors. There is Rttberslarv, always surly and
dark. The Dunion, beyond which lies Jed-
burgh. There are the Eildons, with their
triple heights ; and you can get a glimpse of
the upper woods of Abbotsford, and the top of
the hill above Cauldshiels Loch, that very
spot where the "wondrous potentate/' — when
suffering from languor and pain, and beginning
to break down under his prodigious fertility, —
composed those touching lines : —

" The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill

In Ettrick's vale is sinking sweet ;
The westland wind is hushed and still ;

The lake lies sleeping at my feet.
Yet not the landscape to mine eye

Bears those bright hues that once it bore,
Though evening, with her richest dye,

Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore.

With listless look along the plain

I see Tweed's silver current glide,
And coldly mark the holy fane

Of Melrose rise in ruined pride.
The quiet lake, and balmy air.

The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree.
Are they still such as once they were.

Or is the dreary change in me ?

Alas ! the warped and broken board,
How can it bear the painter's dye 1

The harp of strained and tuneless chord,
How to the minstrel's skill reply !

182 THE FOOTPATH WAY

To aching eyes each landscape lowers,
To feverish pulse each gale blows chill ;

And Araby or Eden's bowers

Were barren as this moorland hill."

There, too, is Minto Hill, as modest and
shapely and smooth as Clytie's shoulders, and
Earlston Black Hill, with Cowdenknowes at its
foot ; and there, standing stark and upright as
a warder, is the stout old Smailholme Tower,
seen and seeing all around. It is quite curious
how unmistakable and important it looks at
what must be twenty and more miles. It is
now ninety years since that "lonely infant,"
who has sung its awful joys, was found in a
thunderstorm, as we all know, lying on the
soft grass at the foot of the grey old Strength,
clapping his hands at each flash, and shouting,
" Bonny ! bonny ! "

We now descended into Yarrow, and for-
gathered with a shepherd who was taking his
lambs over to the great Melrose fair. He was
a fine specimen of a border herd — young, tall,
sagacious, self-contained, and free in speech
and air. We got his heart by praising his dog
Jed, a very fine collie, black and comely, gentle
and keen — " Ay, she's a fell yin ; she tan do a'
but speak." On asking him if the sheep dogs
needed much teaching — "Whyles ay and
whyles no ; her kind (Jed's) needs nane. She
sooks't in wi' her mither's milk." On asking

MINCHMOOR 183

him if the dogs were ever sold, he said —
'^ Never, but at an orra time. Naebody wad
sell a gude dowg, and naebody wad buy an ill
ane." He told us with great feeling, of the
death of one of his best dogs by poison. It
was plainly still a grief to him. " What was
he poisoned with ? " '^ Strychnia/* he said, as
decidedly as might Dr Christison. " How do
you know }" "I opened him, puir fallow, and
got him analeezed ! "

Now we are on Birkindale Brae, and are
looking down on the same scene as did

"James Boyd (the Earle of Arran, his brother was he),"

when he crossed Minehmoor on his way to
deliver James the Fifth's message to

*'Yon outlaw Murray,
Surely whaur bauldly bideth he."

** Down Birkindale Brae when that he cam
He saw the feir Foreste wi' his ee."

How James Boyd fared, and what the outlaw
said, and what James and his nobles said and
did, and how the outlaw at last made peace
with his King, and rose up ^' SherifFe of
Ettricke Foreste," and how the bold ruffian
boasted.

184 THE FOOTPATH WAY

" Fair Philiphaugh is mine by right,

And Lewinshope still mine shall be ;
Newark, Foulshiels, and Tinnies baith
My bow and arrow purchased me.

And I have native steads to me
The Newark Lee o' Hangingshaw.

I have many steads in the Forest schaw,
But them by name I dinna knaw."

And how King James snubbed

" The kene Laird of Buckscleuth,
A stalwart man and stern was he."

When the Laird hinted that,

* ' For a king to gang an outlaw till
Is beneath his state and dignitie.
The man that wins yon forest intill
He lives by reif and felony."

" Then out and spak the nobil King,
And round him cast a wilie ee.

* Now baud thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott,

Nor speak o' reif or felonie —
For^ had every honest man his awin kye^

A richt puir clan thy name wud beP "

(by-the-bye, why did Professor Aytoun leave
out this excellent hit in his edition .-*) — all this
and much more may you see if you take up
The Border Minstrelsy, and read " The Song of
the Outlaw Murray/' with the incomparable

MINCHMOOR 185

notes of Scott. But we are now well down
the hill. There to the left, in the hollow, is
Permanscore, where the King and the outlaw
met: —

*' Bid him mete me at Permanscore,
And bring four in his companie ;
Five Erles sail cum wi' mysel',
Gude^reason I sud honoured be."

And there goes our Shepherd with his long
swinging stride. As different from his dark,
wily companion, the Badenoch drover, as was
Harry Wakefield from Robin Oig; or as the
big, sunny Cheviot is from the lowering
Ruberslaw; and there is Jed trotting meekly
behind him — may she escape strychnia, and,
dying at the fireside among the children, be
laid like

" Paddy Tims — whose soul at aise is —
With the point of his nose
And the tips of his toes
Turn'd up to the roots of the daisies " —

unanaleezed, save by the slow cunning of the
grave. And may her master get the top price
for his lambs !

Do you see to the left that little plantation
on the brow of Foulshiels Hill, with the
sunlight lying on its upper corner.? If you
were there you might find among the brackens

186 THE FOOTPATH WAY

and foxglove a little headstone with ''I. T."
rudely carved on it. That is Tibbie Tamsons
grave, known and feared all the country round.
This poor outcast was a Selkirk woman, who,
under the stress of spiritual despair — that
sense of perdition, which, as in Cowper s case,
often haunts and overmasters the deepest and
gentlest natures, making them think them-
selves

" Damn'd below Judas, more abhorred than he was," —

committed suicide; and being, with the gloomy,
cruel superstition of the time, looked on by
her neighbours as accursed of God, she was
hurried into a rough white deal coffin, and
carted out of the town, the people stoning it
all the way till it crossed the Ettrick. Here,
on this wild hillside, it found its rest, being
buried where three lairds' lands meet. May
we trust that the light of God's reconciled
countenance has for all these long years been
resting on that once forlorn soul, as His blessed
sunshine now lies on her moorland grave !
For "the mountains shall depart, and the hijls
be removed; but my kindness shall not de-
part from thee, neither shall the covenant of
my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath
mercy on thee."

Now, we see down into the Yarrow — there
is the famous stream twinkling in the sun.

MINCHMOOR 187

What stream and valley was ever so be-sung !
You wonder at first why this has been, but the
longer you look the less you wonder. There
is a charm about it — it is not easy to say what.
The huge sunny hills in which it is embosomed
give it a look at once gentle and serious. They
are great, and their gentleness makes them
greater. Wordsworth has the right words,
" pastoral melancholy " ; and besides, the
region is " not uninformed with phantasy and
looks that threaten the profane " — the Flowers
of Yarrow, the Douglas Tragedy, the Dowie
Dens, Wordsworth's Yarrow Unvisited, Visited,
and Re- Visited, and, above all, the glamour of
Sir Walter, and Park's fatal and heroic story.
Where can you find eight more exquisite lines
anywhere than Logan's, which we all know by
heart : —

*' His mother from the window looked,

With all the longing of a mother ;
His little sister, weeping, walked

The greenwood path to meet her brother.
They sought him east, they sought him west,

They sought him all the forest thorough —
They only saw the cloud of night.

They only heard the roar of Yarrow."

And there is Newark Tower among the rich
woods ; and Harehead, that cosiest, loveliest,
and hospitablest of nests. Methinks I hear
certain young voices among the hazels; out

188

they come on the little haugh by the side of
the deepj swirling stream^ Jabulosiis as was ever
Hydaspes. There they go '' running races in
their mirth/' and is not that — an me ludit ama-
bilis insania ? — the voice of ma pauvre petite —
animosa infans — the wilful, rich-eyed, delicious
Eppie ?

' ' Oh blessed vision, happy child,
Thou art so exquisitely wild ! "

And there is Black Andro and Glowr owrem and
Foulshiels, where Park was born and bred ; and
there is the deep pool in the Yarrow where
Scott found him plunging one stone after
another into the water, and watching anxiously
the bubbles as they rose to the surface. " This/'
said Scott to him, " appears but an idle amuse-
ment for one who has seen so much adventure."
" Not so idle, perhaps, as you suppose,"
answered Mungo, "this was the way I used
to ascertain the depth of a river in Africa."
He was then meditating his second journey,
but had said so to no one.

We go down by Broadmeadows, now held b^
that Yair " Hoppringle " — who so well governed
Scinde — and into the grounds of Bowliill, and
passing Philiphaugh, see where stout David
Lesly crossed in the mist at daybreak with his
heavy dragoons, many of them old soldiers of
Gustavus, and routed the gallant Graeme ; and

MINCHMOOR 189

there is Slainmens Lee, where the royalists he ;
and there is Carterhaugh, the scene of the
strange wild story of Tamlane and Lady Janet,
when

"She prinked hersell and prinned hersell
By the ae light of the moon,
And she's awa' to Carterhaugh
To speak wi' young Tamlane."

Noel Paton might paint that night, when

*' 'Twixt the hours of twelve and yin
A north wind tore tht bent " ;

when " fair Janet " in her green mantle

'* heard strange eiritch sounds

Upon the wind that went."

And straightway

*' About the dead hour o' the night
She heard the bridles ring ;
Their oaten pipes blew wondrous shrill,

The hemlock small blew clear ;
And louder notes from hemlock large
And bog reed, struck the ear,"

and then the fairy cavalcade swept past, while
Janet, filled with love and fear, looked out for
the milk-white steed, and "gruppit it fast,"
and " pu'd the rider doon," the young Tamlane,

190 THE FOOTPATH WAY

whom, after dipping " in a stand of milk and
then in a stand of water,"

*' She wrappit ticht in her green mantle,
And sae her true love won ! "

This ended our walk. We found the carriage
at the Philiphaugh home-farm, and we drove
home by Yair and Fernilee, Ashestiel and Elibajik,
and passed the bears as ferocious as ever, " the
orange sky of evening " glowing through their
wild tusks, the old house looking even older in
the fading light. And is not this a walk worth
making ? One of our number had been at
the Land's End and Johnnie Groat's, and now
on Minchmoor ; and we wondered how many
other men had been at all the three, and how
many had enjoyed Minchmoor more than he.

Dr John Broivn.

In Praise of Walking

As a man grows old, he is told by some
moralists that he may find consolation
for increasing infirmities in looking
back upon a well-spent life. No doubt such a
retrospect must be very agreeable, but the
question must occur to many of us whether
our life offers the necessary materials for self-
complacency. What part of it, if any, has
been well spent ? To that I find it convenient
to reply, for my own purposes, any part in
which I thoroughly enjoyed myself If it be
proposed to add " innocently," I will not quarrel
with the amendment. Perhaps, indeed, I may
have a momentary regret for some pleasures
which do not quite deserve that epithet, but
the pleasure of which I am about to speak
is obtrusively and pre-eminently innocent.
Walking is among recreations what ploughing
and fishing are among industrial labours : it is
primitive and simple ; it brings us into contact
with mother earth and unsophisticated nature ;
it requires no elaborate apparatus and no ex-
traneous excitement. It is fit even for poets
and philosophers, and he who can thoroughly
191

192 THE FOOTPATH WAY

enjoy it must have at least some capacity for
worshipping the " cherub Contemplation." He
must be able to enjoy his own society without
the factitious stimulants of the more violent
physical recreations. I have always been a
humble admirer of athletic excellence. I
retain, in spite of much head-shaking from
wise educationalists, my early veneration for
the heroes of the river and the cricket-field.
To me they have still the halo which sur-
rounded them in the days when " muscular
Christianity " was first preached and the whole
duty of man said to consist in fearing God and
walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours.
I rejoice unselfishly in these later days to see
the stream of bicyclists restoring animation to
deserted highroads or to watch even respected
contemporaries renewing their youth in the
absorbing delights of golf. While honouring
all genuine delight in manly exercises, I regret
only the occasional admixture of lower motives
which may lead to its degeneration. Now it
is one merit of walking that its real devotees
are little exposed to such temptations. Of
course there are such things as professional
pedestrians making " records " and seeking the
applause of the mob. When I read of the im-
mortal Captain Barclay performing his marvel-
lous feats, I admire respectfully, but I fear that
his motives included a greater admixture of

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 193

vanity than of the emotions congenial to the
higher intellect. The true walker is one to
whom the pursuit is in itself delightful ; who
is not indeed priggish enough to be above a
certain complacency in the physical prowess
required for his pursuit, but to whom the
muscular effort of the legs is subsidiary to the
" cerebration " stimulated by the effort ; to the
quiet musings and imaginings which arise most
spontaneously as he walks, and generate the
intellectual harmony which is the natural ac-
companiment to the monotonous tramp of his
feet. The cyclist or the golf-player, I am told,
can hold such intercourse with himself in the
intervals of striking the ball or working his
machine. But the true pedestrian loves walk-
ing because, so far from distracting his mind,
it is favourable to the equable and abundant
flow of tranquil and half-conscious meditation.
Therefore I should be soiTy if the pleasures of
cycling or any other recreation tended to put
out of fashion the habit of the good old walk-
ing tour.

For my part, when I try to summon up re-
membrance of " well-spent " moments, I find
myself taking a kind of inverted view of the
past ; inverted, that is, so far as the accidental
becomes the essential. If I turn over the
intellectual album which memory is always
compiling, I find that the most distinct pictures

N

194 THE FOOTPATH WAY

which it contains are those of old walks.
Other memories of incomparably greater in-
trinsic value coalesce into wholes. They are
more massive but less distinct. The memory
of a friendship that has brightened one's whole
life survives not as a series of incidents but
as a general impression of the friend's charac-
teristic qualities due to the superposition of
innumerable forgotten pictures. I remember
him, not the specific conversations by which
he revealed himself. The memories of walks,
on the other hand, are all localised and dated ;
they are hitched on to particular times and
places ; they spontaneously form a kind of
calendar or connecting thread upon which
other memories may be strung. As I look
back, a long series of little vignettes presents
itself, each representing a definite stage of my
earthly pilgrimage summed up and embodied
in a walk. Their background of scenery re-
calls places once familiar, and the thoughts
associated with the places revive thoughts
of the contemporary occupations. The labour
of scribbling books happily leaves no distinct
impression, and I would forget that .^ had
ever been undergone ; but the picture of some
delightful ramble includes incidentally a re-
ference to the nightmare of literary toil from
which it relieved me. The author is but the
accidental appendage of the tramp. My days

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 195

are bound each to each not by " natural piety "
(or not, let me say, by natural piety alone)
but by pedestrian enthusiasm. The memory
of school days, if one may trust to the usual
reminiscences, generally clusters round a flog-
ging, or some solemn words from the spiritual
teacher instilling the seed of a guiding principle
of life. I remember a sermon or two rather
ruefully ; and I confess to memories of a
flogging so unjust that I am even now stung
by the thought of it. But what comes most
spontaneously to my mind is the memory of
certain strolls, " out of bounds," when I could
forget the Latin grammar, and enjoy such a
sense of the beauties of nature as is embodied
for a child in a pond haunted by water-rats, or
a field made romantic by threats of "man-
traps and spring-guns." Then, after a crude
fashion, one was becoming more or less of
a reflecting and individual being, not a mere
automaton set in movement by pedagogic
machinery.

The day on which I was fully initiated
into the mysteries is marked by a white
stone. It was when I put on a knapsack
and started from Heidelberg for a march
through the Odenwald. Then I first knew
the delightful sensation of independence and
detachment enjoyed during a walking tour.
Free from all bothers of railway time-tables

196 THE FOOTPATH WAY

and extraneous machinery, you trust to your
own legs, stop when you please, diverge into
any track that takes your fancy, and drop in
upon some quaint variety of human life at
every inn where you put up for the night.
You share for the time the mood in which
Borrow settled down in the dingle after escap-
ing from his bondage in the publishers' London
slums. You have no dignity to support, and
the dress-coat of conventional life has dropped
into oblivion, like the bundle from Christian's
shoulders. You are in the world of Lavengro,
and would be prepared to take tea with Miss
Isopel Berners or with the Welsh preacher
who thought that he had committed the
unpardonable sin. Borrow, of course, took the
life more seriously than the literary gentle-
man who is only escaping on ticket-of-leave
from the prison-house of respectability, and is
quite unequal to a personal conflict with " blaz-
ing Bosville " — the flaming tinman. He is
only dipping in the element where his model
was thoroughly at home. I remember, indeed,
one figure in that first walk which I associate
with Benedict Moll, the strange treasure-
seeker whom Borrow encountered in his
Spanish rambles. My acquaintance was a mild
German innkeeper, who sat beside me on a
bench while 1 was trying to assimilate certain
pancakes, the only dinner he could provide.

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 197

still fearful in memory, but just attackable
after a thirty-miles' tramp. He confided to
me that, poor as he was, he had discovered
the secret of perpetual motion. He kept his
machine upstairs, where it discharged the
humble duty of supplying the place of a shoe-
black ; but he was about to go to London
to offer it to a British capitalist. He looked
wistfully at me as possibly a capitalist in
(very deep) disguise, and I thought it wise
to evade a full explanation. I have not been
worthy to encounter many of such quaint
incidents and characters as seem to have been
normal in Borrow' s experience ; but the first
walk, commonplace enough, remains distinct
in my memory. I kept no journal, but I could
still give the narrative day by day — the sights
which I dutifully admired and the very state
of my bootlaces. Walking tours thus rescue
a bit of one's life from oblivion. They play
in one's personal recollections the part of those
historical passages in which Carlyle is an un-
equalled master ; the little islands of light in
the midst of the darkening gloom of the past,
on which you distinguish the actors in some
old drama actually alive and moving. The
devotee of other athletic sports remembers
special incidents : the occasion on which he
hit a cricket-ball over the pavilion at Lord's,
or the crab which he caught as his boat

198 THE FOOTPATH WAY

was shooting Barnes Bridge. But those are
memories of exceptional moments of glory or
the reverse, and apt to be tainted by vanity
or the spirit of competition. The walks are
the unobtrusive connecting thread of other
memories, and yet each walk is a little drama
in itself, with a definite plot with episodes and
catastrophes, according to the requirements of
Aristotle; and it is naturally interwoven with
all the thoughts, the friendships, and the
interests that form the staple of ordinary
life.

Walking is the natural recreation for a man
who desires not absolutely to suppress his in-
tellect but to turn it out to play for a season.
All great men of letters have, therefore, been
enthusiastic walkers (exceptions, of course,
excepted). Shakespeare, besides being a
sportsman, a lawyer, a divine, and so forth,
conscientiously observed his own maxim, " Jog
on, jog on, the footpath way " ; though a full
proof of this could only be given in an octavo
volume. Anyhow, he divined the connection
between walking and a "merry heart"; that
is, of course, a cheerful acceptance of our
position in the universe founded lipon the
deepest moral and philosophical principles.
His friend, Ben Jonson, walked from London
to Scotland. Another gentleman of the period
(I forget his name) danced from London to

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 199

Norwich. Tom Coryate hung up in his parish
church the shoes in which he walked from
Venice and then started to walk (with occasional
lifts) to India. Contemporary walkers of more
serious character might be quoted, such as the
admirable Barclay, the famous Quaker apolo-
gist, from whom the great Captain Barclay
inherited his prowess. Every one, too, must
remember the incident in Walton's Life of
Hooker. Walking from Oxford to Exeter,
Hooker went to see his godfather. Bishop
Jewel, at Salisbury. The Bishop said that he
would lend him " a horse which hath carried
me many a mile, and, I thank God, with much
ease," and "presently delivered into his hands
a walking staff with which he professed he had
travelled through many parts of Germany."
He added ten groats and munificently promised
ten groats more when Hooker should restore
the "horse." When, in later days. Hooker
once rode to London, he expressed more
passion than that mild divine was ever known
to show upon any other occasion against a
friend who had dissuaded him from " footing
it." The hack, it seems, "trotted when he
did not," and discomposed the thoughts which
had been soothed by the walking staff. His
biographer must be counted, I fear, among
those who do not enjoy walking without the
incidental stimulus of sport. Yet the Compleat

200 THE FOOTPATH WAY

Angler and his friends start by a walk of twenty
good miles before they take their -^morning
draught." Swift, perhaps, was the first person
to show a full appreciation of the moral and
physical advantages of walking. He preached
constantly upon this text to Stella, and
practised his own advice. It is true that his
notions of a journey were somewhat limited.
Ten miles a day was his regular allowance
when he went from London to Holyhead, but
then he spent time in lounging at wayside
inns to enjoy the talk of the tramps and
ostlers. The fact, though his biographers are
rather scandalised, shows that he really appre-
ciated one of the true charms of pedestrian
expeditions. Wesley is generally credited
with certain moral reforms, but one secret
of his power is not always noticed. In his
early expeditions he went on foot to save horse
hire, and made the great discovery that twenty
or thirty miles a day was a wholesome allow-
ance for a healthy man. The fresh air and
exercise put "spirit into his sermons," which
could not be rivalled by the ordinary parson of
the period, who too often passed his leisure
lounging by his fireside. Fielding poifits the
contrast. Trulliber, embodying the clerical
somnolence of the day, never gets beyond his
pig-sties, but the model Parson Adams steps
out so vigorously that he distances the stage-

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 201

coach, and disappears in the distance rapt in
the congenial pleasures of walking and compos-
ing a sermon. Fielding, no doubt, shared his
hero's taste, and that explains the contrast
between his vigorous naturalism and the
sentimentalism of Richardson, who was to be
seen, as he tells us, " stealing along from
Hammersmith to Kensington with his eyes on
the ground, propping his unsteady limbs with
a stick." Even the ponderous Johnson used
to dissipate his early hypochondria by walking
from Lichfield to Birmingham and back (thirty-
two miles), and his later melancholy would
have changed to a more cheerful view of life
could he have kept up the practice in his
beloved London streets. The literary move-
ment at the end of the eighteenth century was
obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to
the renewed practice of walking. Words-
worth's poetical autobiography shows how every
stage in his early mental development was
connected with some walk in the Lakes. The
sunrise which startled him on a walk after
a night spent in dancing first set him apart as
a "dedicated spirit." His walking tour in the
Alps — then a novel performance — roused him
to his first considerable poem. His chief per-
formance is the record of an excursion on foot.
He kept up the practice, and De Quincey
calculates somewhere what multiple of the

202 THE FOOTPATH WAY

earth's circumference he had measured on his
legs, assuming, it appears, that he averaged
ten miles a day. De Quincey himself, we are
told, slight and fragile as he was, was a good
walker, and would run up a hill "like a
squirrel." Opium-eating is not congenial to
walking, yet even Coleridge, after beginning
the habit, speaks of walking forty miles a day
in Scotland, and, as we all know, the great
manifesto of the new school of poetry, the
Lyrical Ballads, was suggested by the famous
walk with Wordsworth, when the first stanzas
of the Ancient Mariner were composed. A
remarkable illustration of the wholesome influ-
ence might be given from the cases of Scott and
Byron. Scott, in spite of his lameness, delighted
in walks of twenty and thirty miles a day, and
in climbing crags, trusting to the strength of
his arms to remedy the stumblings of his foot.
The early strolls enabled him to saturate his
mind with local traditions, and the passion for
walking under difficulties showed the manl}^
nature which has endeared him to three
generations. Byron's lameness was too severe
to admit of walking, and therefore all the un-
wholesome humours which would have been
walked off in a good cross-country march
accumulated in his brain and caused the
defects, the morbid affectation and perverse
misanthropy, which half ruined the achieve-

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 203

ment of the most masculine intellect of his
time.

It is needless to accumulate examples of a
doctrine which will no doubt be accepted as
soon as it is announced. Walking is the best
of panaceas for the morbid tendencies of
authors. It is, I need only observe, as good
for reasoners as for poets. The name of
" peripatetic" suggests the connection. Hobbes
walked steadily up and down the hills in his
patron's park when he was in his venerable
old age. To the same practice may be justly
ascribed the utilitarian philosophy. Old Jeremy
Bentham kept himself up to his work for
eighty years by his regular "post-jentacular
circumgyrations." His chief disciple, James
Mill, walked incessantly and preached as he
walked. John Stuart Mill imbibed at once
psychology, political economy, and a love of
walks from his father. Walking was his one
recreation ; it saved him from becoming a
mere smoke-dried pedant ; and though he put
forward the pretext of botanical researches,
it helped him to perceive that man is some-
thing besides a mere logic machine. Mill's
great rival as a spiritual guide, Carlyle, was
a vigorous walker, and even in his latest years
was a striking figure when performing his
regular constitutionals in London. One of the
vivid passages in the Reminiscences describes his

204 THE FOOTPATH WAY

walk with Irving from Glasgow to Drumclog.
Here they sat on the " brow of a peat hag,
while far, far away to the westward, over our
brown horizon, towered up white and visible
at the many miles of distance a high irregular
pyramid. Ailsa Craig we at once guessed,
and thought of the seas and oceans over
yonder." The vision naturally led to a solemn
conversation, which was an event in both lives.
Neither Irving nor Carlyle himself feared any
amount of walking in those days, it is added,
and next day Carlyle took his longest walk,
fifty-four miles. Carlyle is unsurpassable in
his descriptions of scenery : from the pictures
of mountains in Sartor Resartus to the battle-
pieces in Frederick. Ruskin, himself a good
walker, is more rhetorical but not so graphic ;
and it is self-evident that nothing educates an
eye for the features of a landscape so well as
the practice of measuring it by your own legs.
The great men, it is true, have not always
acknowledged their debt to the genius, who-
ever he may be, who presides over pedestrian
exercise. Indeed, they have inclined to ignore
the true source of their impulse. Even when
they speak of the beauties of nature, they would
give us to understand that they might have
been disembodied spirits, taking aerial flights
among mountain solitudes, and independent of
the physical machinery of legs and stomachs.

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 205

When long ago the Alps cast their spell upon
me, it was woven in a great degree by the
eloquence of Modern Painters. I hoped to
share Ruskin's ecstasies in a reverent worship
of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. The
influence of any cult, however, depends upon
the character of the worshipper, and I fear that
in this case the charm operated rather per-
versely. I stimulated a passion for climbing
which absorbed my energies and distracted
me from the prophet's loftier teaching. I
might have followed him from the mountains
to picture-galleries, and spent among the
stones of Venice hours which I devoted to
attacking hitherto unascended peaks and so
losing my last chance of becoming an art
critic. I became a fair judge of an Alpine
guide, but I do not even know how to make
a judicious allusion to Botticelli or Tintoretto.
I can't say that I feel the smallest remorse.
I had a good time, and at least escaped one
temptation to talking nonsense. It follows,
however, that my passion for the mountains
had something earthly in its composition.
It is associated with memories of eating and
drinking. It meant delightful comradeship
with some of the best of friends ; but our end,
I admit, was not always of the most exalted
or aesthetic strain. A certain difficulty results.
I feel an uncomfortable diffidence. I hold

206 THE FOOTPATH WAY

that Alpine walks are the poetry of the pur-
suit ; I could try to justify the opinion by
relating some of the emotions suggested by
the great scenic effects : the sunrise on the
snow fields ; the storm-clouds gathering under
the great peaks ; the high pasturages knee-
deep in flowers ; the torrents plunging through
the "cloven ravines/' and so forth. But the
thing has been done before^ better than I
could hope to do it ; and when I look back
at those old passages in Modem Painters, and
think of the enthusiasm which prompted to
exuberant sentences of three or four hundred
words, I am not only abashed by the thought
of their unapproachable eloquence, but feel as
though they conveyed a tacit reproach. You,
they seem to say, are, after all, a poor prosaic
creature, affecting a love of sublime scenery
as a cloak for more grovelling motives. I
could protest against this judgment, but it is
better at present to omit the topic, even
though it would give the strongest ground-
work for my argument.

Perhaps, therefore, it is better to trust the
case for walking to where the external
stimulus of splendours and sublimities is not
so overpowering. A philosophic historian
divides the world into the regions where man
is stronger than nature and the regions where
nature is stronger than man. The true charm

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 207

of walking is most unequivocally shown when
it is obviously dependent upon the walker
himself. I became an enthusiast in the Alps,
but I have found almost equal pleasure in
walks such as one described by Cowper, where
the view from a summit is bounded, not by
Alps or Apennines, but by "a lofty quickset
hedge." Walking gives a charm to the most
commonplace British scenery. A love of walk-
ing not only makes any English county toler-
able but seems to make the charm inexhaustible.
I know only two or three districts minutely,
but the more familiar I have become with
any of them the more I have wished to
return, to invent some new combination of old
strolls or to inspect some hitherto unexplored
nook. I love the English Lakes, and certainly
not on account of associations. I cannot
" associate." Much as I respect Wordsworth,
I don't care to see the cottage in which he
lived : it only suggests to me that anybody
else might have lived there. There is an
intrinsic charm about the Lake Country, and
to me at least a music in the very names of
Helvellyn and Skiddaw and Scawfell. But
this may be due to the suggestion that it is
a miniature of the Alps. I appeal, therefore,
to the Fen Country, the country of which
Alton Locke's farmer boasted that it had none
of your "darned ups and downs" and "was as

208 THE FOOTPATH WAY

flat as his barn-door for forty miles on end." I
used to climb the range of the Gogmagogs^ to
see the tower of Ely^ some sixteen miles across
the dead level, and I boasted that every term
I devised a new route for walking to the
cathedral from Cambridge. Many of these
routes led by the little public-house called
'' Five Miles from Anywhere " : which in my
day was the Mecca to which a remarkable club,
called — from the name of the village — the
" Upware Republic/' made periodic pilgrim-
ages. What its members specifically did when
they got there beyond consuming beer is un-
known to me ; but the charm was in the
distance ^^ from anywhere " — a sense of solitude
under the great canopy of the heavens, where,
like emblems of infinity,

"The trenched waters run from sky to sky."

I have always loved walks in the Fens. In
a steady march along one of the great dykes
by the monotonous canal with the exuberant
vegetation dozing in its stagnant waters, we
were imbibing the spirit of the scenery. Our
talk might be of senior wranglers or the Uni-
versity crew, but we felt the curious^harm of
the great flats. The absence, perhaps, of
definite barriers makes you realise that you
are on the surface of a planet rolling through
free and boundless space. One queer figure

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 209

comes back to me — a kind of scholar-gipsy of
the fens. Certain peculiarities made it un-
desirable to trust him with cash, and his family
used to support him by periodically paying his
score at riverside publics. They allowed him
to print certain poems, moreover, which he
would impart when one met him on the tow-
path. In my boyhood, I remember, I used to
fancy that the most delightful of all lives must
be that of a bargee — enjoying a perpetual
picnic. This gentleman seemed to have
carried out the idea ; and in the intervals
of lectures, I could fancy that he had chosen
the better part. His poems, alas ! have
long vanished from my memory, and I there-
fore cannot quote what would doubtless have
given the essence of the local sentiment
and invested such names as Wicken Fen or
Swaffham Lode with associations equal to those
of Arnold's Hincksey ridge and Fyfield elm.

Another set of walks may, perhaps, appeal
to more general sympathy. The voice of the
sea, we know, is as powerful as the voice of
the mountain; and, to my taste, it is difficult
to say whether the Land's End is not in itself
a more impressive station than the top of
Mont Blanc. The solitude of the frozen peaks
suggests tombstones and death. The sea is
always alive and at work. The hovering gulls
and plunging gannets and the rollicking por-

210 THE FOOTPATH WAY

poises are animating symbols of a gallant
struggle with wind and wave. Even the
unassociative mind has a vague sense of the
Armada and Hakluyt's heroes in the back-
ground. America and Australia are just over
the way. " Is not this a dull place ? " asked
some one of an old woman whose cottage was
near to the Lizard lighthouse. " No/' she
replied, '^it is so ^cosmopolitan.*" That was
a simple-minded way of expressing the charm
suggested in Milton's wonderful phrase :

•'Where the great Vision of the guarded Mount
Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold."

She could mentally follow the great ships
coming and going, and shake hands with people
at the ends of the earth. The very sight of
a fishing-boat, as painters seem to have found
out, is a poem in itself. But is it not all
written in Westward Ho ! and in the Prose
Idylls, in which Kingsley put his most genuine
power ? Of all walks that I have made, I can
remember none more delightful than those
round the south-western promontory. I have
followed the coast at different times from the
mouth of the Bristol Avon by the Land's End
to the Isle of Wight, and I am only puzzled to
decide which bay or cape is the most delight-
ful. I only know that the most delightful
was the more enjoyable when placed in its

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 211

proper setting by a long walk. When you
have made an early start, followed the coast-
guard track on the slopes above the cliffs,
struggled through the gold and purple carpet-
ing of gorse and heather on the moors, dipped
down into quaint little coves with a primitive
fishing village, followed the blinding whiteness
of the sands round a lonely bay, and at last
emerged upon a headland where you can settle
into a nook of the rocks, look down upon the
glorious blue of the Atlantic waves breaking
into foam on the granite, and see the distant
sea-levels glimmering away till they blend
imperceptibly into cloudland ; then you can
consume your modest sandwiches, light your
pipe, and feel more virtuous and thoroughly at
peace with the universe than it is easy even to
conceive yourself elsewhere. I have fancied
myself on such occasions to be a felicitous
blend of poet and saint — which is an agreeable
sensation. What I wish to point out, however,
is that the sensation is confined to the walker.
I respect the cyclist, as I have said ; but he
is enslaved by his machine : he has to follow
the highroad, and can only come upon what
points of view open to the commonplace
tourist. He can see nothing of the retired
scenery which may be close to him, and can-
not have his mind brought into due harmony
by the solitude and by the long succession of

212 THE FOOTPATH WAY

lovely bits of scenery which stand so coyly
aside from public notice.

The cockney cyclist who wisely seeks to
escape at intervals from the region "where
houses thick and sewers annoy the air/' suffers
the same disadvantages. To me, for many
years, it was a necessity of life to interpolate
gulps of fresh air between the periods of in-
haling London fogs. When once beyond the
"town" I looked out for notices that tres-
passers would be prosecuted. That gave
a strong presumption that the trespass must
have some attraction. The cyclist could only
reflect that trespassing for him was not only
forbidden but impossible. To me it was a
reminder of the many delicious bits of walking
which, even in the neighbourhood of London,
await the man who has no superstitious rever-
ence for legal rights. It is indeed surprising
how many charming walks can be contrived by
a judicious combination of a little trespassing
with the rights of way happily preserved over
so many commons and footpaths. London, it
is true, goes on stretching its vast octopus
arms farther into the country. Unlike the
devouring dragon of Wantley, to whotn " houses
and churches" were like "geese and turkies,"
it spreads houses and churches over the fields
of our childhood. And yet, between the great
lines of railway there are still fields not yet

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 213

desecrated by advertisements of liver pills. It
is a fact that within twenty miles of London
two travellers recently asked their way at
a lonely farmhouse ; and that the mistress of
the house, seeing that they were far from an
inn, not only gave them a seat and luncheon,
but positively refused to accept payment.
That suggested an idyllic state of society which,
it is true, one must not count upon discovering.
Yet hospitality, the virtue of primitive regions,
has not quite vanished, it would appear, even
from this over-civilised region. The travellers,
perhaps, had something specially attractive in
their manners. In that or some not distant
ramble they made time run back for a couple
of centuries. They visited the quiet grave
where Penn lies under the shadow of the old
Friends' meeting-house, and came to the
cottage where the seat on which Milton talked
to EUwood about Paradise Regained seems to be
still waiting for his return ; and climbed the
hill to the queer monument which records how
Captain Cook demonstrated the goodness of
Providence by disproving the existence of
a continent in the South Sea — (the argument
is too obvious to require exposition) ; and then
gazed reverently upon the obelisk, not far off,
which marks the point at which George III.
concluded a famous stag hunt. A little valley
in the quiet chalk country of Buckinghamshire

214 THE FOOTPATH WAY

leads past these and other memorials, and the
lover of historical associations, with the help
of Thome's Environs of London, may add in-
definitely to the list. I don't object to an
association when it presents itself spontane-
ously and unobtrusively. It should not be
the avowed goal but the accidental addition
to the interest of a walk ; and it is then
pleasant to think of one's ancestors as sharers
in the pleasures. The region enclosed within
a radius of thirty miles from Charing Cross has
charms enough even for the least historical of
minds. You can't hold a fire in your hand,
according to a high authority, by thinking
on the frosty Caucasus ; but I can comfort
myself now and then, when the fellow-
passengers who tread on my heels in London
have put me out of temper, by thinking of
Leith Hill. It only rises to the height of a
thousand feet by help of the " Folly " on the
top, but you can see, says my authority,
twelve counties from the tower ; and, if certain
legendary ordnance surveyors spoke the truth,
distinguish the English Channel to the south,
and Dunstable Hill, far beyond London, to
the north. The Crystal Palace, to6, as we
are assured, "sparkles like a diamond." That
is gratifying ; but to me the panorama suggests
a whole network of paths, which have been the
scene of personally conducted expeditions, in

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 215

which I displayed the skill on which I most
pride myself — skill, I mean, in devising judi-
cious geographical combinations, and especi-
ally of contriving admirable short cuts. The
persistence of some companions in asserting
that my short cuts might be the longest way
round shows that the best of men are not
free from jealousy. Mine, at any rate, led
me and my friends through pleasant places in-
numerable. My favourite passage in Pilgrims
Progress — an allegory which could have
occurred, by the way, to no one who was
not both a good man and a good walker —
was always that in which Christian and
Hopeful leave the highroad to cross a stile
into "Bypath Meadow." I should certainly
have approved the plan. The path led
them, it is true, into the castle of Giant
Despair; but the law of trespass has become
milder; and the incident really added that
spice of adventure which is delightful to the
genuine pilgrim. We defied Giant Despair ;
and if our walks were not quite so edifying
as those of Christian and his friends, they
add a pleasant strand to the thread of
memory which joins the past years. Con-
versation, we are often told, like letter-
writing, is a lost art. We live too much in
crowds. But if ever men can converse
pleasantly, it is when they are invigorated

216 THE FOOTPATH WAY

by a good march : when the reserve is
lowered by the long familiarity of a common
pursuit, or when, if bored, you can quietly
drop behind, or perhaps increase the pace
sufficiently to check the breath of the per-
sistent argufier.

Nowhere, at least, have I found talk flow so
freely and pleasantly as in a march through
pleasant country. And yet there is also a
peculiar charm in the solitary expedition
when your interlocutor must be yourself.
That may be enjoyed, perhaps even best
enjoyed, in London streets themselves. I
have read somewhere of a distinguished
person who composed his writings during
such perambulations, and the statement was
supposed to prove his remarkable power of
intellectual concentration. My own experi-
ence would tend to diminish the wonder. I
hopelessly envy men who can think con-
secutively under conditions distracting to
others — in a crowded meeting or in the
midst of their children — for I am as sensitive
as most people to distraction; but if I can
think at all, I am not sure that the roar of
the Strand is not a more favourable environ-
ment than the quiet of my own study. The
mind — one must only judge from one's own —
seems to me to be a singularly ill-constructed
apparatus. Thoughts are slippery things. It

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 217

is terribly hard to keep them in the track
presented by logic. They jostle each other,
and suddenly skip aside to make room for
irrelevant and accidental neighbours; till the
stream of thought, of which people talk,
resembles rather such a railway journey as
one makes in dreams, where at every few
yards you are shunted on to the wrong line.
Now, though a London street is full of dis-
tractions, they become so multitudinous that
they neutralise each other. The whirl of con-
flicting impulses becomes a continuous current
because it is so chaotic and determines a
mood of sentiment if not a particular vein of
reflection. Wordsworth describes the influ-
ence upon himself in a curious passage of
his Prelude. He wandered through London
as a raw country lad, seeing all the sights
from Bartholomew Fair to St Stephen's, and
became a unit of the "monstrous ant-hill in
a too busy world." Of course, according to his
custom, he drew a moral, and a most excellent
moral, from the bewildering complexity of his
new surroundings. He learnt, it seems, to
recognise the unity of man and to feel that
the spirit of nature was upon him " in London's
vast domain" as well as on the mountains.
That comes of being a philosophical poet with
a turn for optimism. I will not try to interpret
or to comment, for I am afraid that I have

218 THE FOOTPATH WAY

not shared the emotions which he expresses.
A cockney, born and bred, takes surround-
ings for granted. The hubbub has ceased to
distract him ; he is like the people who were
said to become deaf because they always lived
within the roar of a waterfall : he realises the
common saying that the deepest solitude is
solitude in a crowd ; he derives a certain
stimulus from a vague sympathy with the
active life around him, but each particular
stimulus remains, as the phrase goes, " below
the threshold of consciousness." To some
such effect, till psychologists will give me a
better theory, I attribute the fact that what
I please to call my "mind" seems to work
more continuously and coherently in a street
walk than elsewhere. This, indeed, may
sound like a confession of cynicism. The man
who should open his mind to the impressions
naturally suggested by the "monstrous ant-
hill " would be in danger of becoming a philan-
thropist or a pessimist, of being overpowered
by thoughts of gigantic problems, or of the
impotence of the individual to solve them.
Carlyle, if I remember rightly, took Emerson
round London in order to convince his opti-
mistic friend that the devil was still in full
activity. The gates of hell might be found in
every street. I remember how, when coming
home from a country walk on a sweltering

IN PRAISE OF WALKING 219

summer night, and seeing the squalid popula-
tion turning out for a gasp of air in their only
playground, the vast labyrinth of hideous lanes,
I seemed to be in Thomson's City of Dreadful
Night. Even the vanishing of quaint old nooks
is painful when one's attention is aroused.
There is a certain churchyard wall, which I
pass sometimes, with an inscription to com-
memorate the benefactor who erected it ^^ to
keep out the pigs." I regret the pigs and the
village green which they presumably imply.
The heart, it may be urged, must be hardened
not to be moved by many such texts for
melancholy reflection. I will not argue the
point. None of us can be always thinking
over the riddle of the universe, and I confess
that my mind is generally employed on much
humbler topics. I do not defend my insensi-
bility nor argue that London walks are the
best. I only maintain that even in London,
walking has a peculiar fascination. The top
of an omnibus is an excellent place for medi-
tation; but it has not, for me at least, that
peculiar hypnotic influence which seems to be
favourable to thinking, and to pleasant day-
dreaming when locomotion is carried on by
one's own muscles. The charm, however, is*
that even a walk in London often vaguely
recalls better places and nobler forms of the
exercise. Wordsworth's Susan hears a thrush

220 THE FOOTPATH WAY

at the comer of Wood Street, and straight-
way sees

*' A mountain ascending, a vision of trees,

Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide.
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside."

The gulls which seem lately to have found
out the merits of London give to occasional
Susans, I hope, a whifF of fresh sea-breezes.
But, even without gulls or wood-pigeons, I can
often find occasions in the heart of London
for recalling the old memories, without any
definable pretext ; little pictures of scenery,
sometimes assignable to no definable place,
start up invested with a faint aroma of old
friendly walks and solitary meditations and
strenuous exercise, and I feel convinced that,
if I am not a thorough scoundrel, I owe that
relative excellence to the harmless monomania
which so often took me, to appropriate Bunyan's
phrase, from the amusements of Vanity Fair to
the Delectable Mountains of pedestrianism.

Leslie Stephen.

The Exhilarations of the Koad

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.

Whitman.

OCCASIONALLY on the sidewalk,
amid the dapper, swiftly - moving,
high - heeled boots and gaiters, I
catch a glimpse of the naked human foot.
Nimbly it scuffs along, the toes spread, the
sides flatten, the heel protrudes ; it grasps the
curbing, or bends to the form of the uneven
surfaces, — a thing sensuous and alive, that
seems to take cognisance of whatever it
touches or passes. How primitive and uncivil
it looks in such company, — a real barbarian in
the parlour. We are so unused to the human
anatomy, to simple, unadorned nature, that it
looks a little repulsive ; but it is beautiful for
all that. Though it be a black foot and an
unwashed foot, it shall be exalted. It is a
thing of life amid leather, a free spirit amid
cramped, a wild bird amid caged, an athlete
amid consumptives. It is the symbol of my
order, the Order of Walkers. That un-
hampered, vitally playing piece of anatomy is

221

222 THE FOOTPATH WAY

the type of the pedestrian^ man returned to
first principles, in direct contact and intercourse
with the earth and the elements, his faculties
unsheathed, his mind plastic, his body tough-
ened, his heart light, his soul dilated : while
those cramped and distorted members in the
calf and kid are the unfortunate wretches
doomed to carriages and cushions.

I am not going to advocate the disuse of
boots and shoes, or the abandoning of the im-
proved modes of travel ; but I am going to
brag as lustily as I can on behalf of the
pedestrian, and show how all the shining
angels second and accompany the man who
goes afoot, while all the dark spirits are ever
looking out for a chance to ride.

When I see the discomforts that able-bodied
American men will put up with rather than go
a mile or half a mile on foot, the abuses they
will tolerate and encourage, crowding the
street car on a little fall in the temperature
or the appearance of an inch or two of snow,
packing up to overflowing, dangling to the
straps, treading on each other's toes, breathing
each other's breaths, crushing the women and
children, hanging by tooth and nail to^ square
inch of the platform, imperilling their limbs
and killing the horses, — I think the commonest
tramp in the street has good reason to felici-
tate himself on his rare privilege of going afoot.

EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 223

Indeed, a race that neglects or despises this
primitive gift, that fears the touch of the soil,
that has no footpaths, no community of owner-
ship in the land which they imply, that warns
off the walker as a trespasser, that knows no
way but the highway, the carriage-way, that
forgets the stile, the foot-bridge, that even
ignores the rights of the pedestrian in the
public road, providing no escape for him but in
the ditch or up the bank, is in a fair way to
far more serious degeneracy.

Shakespeare makes the chief qualification
of the walker a merry heart : —

"Jog on, jog on the footpath way,
And merrily hent the stile-a ;
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a."

The human body is a steed that goes freest
and longest under a light rider, and the
lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart. Your
sad, or morose, or embittered, or preoccupied
heart settles heavily into the saddle, and the
poor beast, the body, breaks down the first
mile. Indeed, the heaviest thing in the
world is a heavy heart. Next to that the
most burdensome to the walker is a heart
not in perfect sympathy and accord with the
body — a reluctant or unwilling heart. The
horse and rider must not only both be willing

224 THE FOOTPATH WAY

to go the same way, but the rider must lead
the way and infuse his own lightness and
eagerness into the steed. Herein is no doubt
our trouble and one reason of the decay of the
noble art in this country. We are unwilling
walkers. We are not innocent and simple-
hearted enough to enjoy a walk. We have
fallen from that state of grace which capacity
to enjoy a walk implies. It cannot be said
that as a people we are so positively sad, or
morose, or melancholic as that we are vacant
of that sportiveness and surplusage of animal
spirits that characterised our ancestors, and
that springs from full and harmonious life, —
a sound heart in accord with a sound body.
A man must invest himself near at hand and
in common things, and be content with a
steady and moderate return, if he would know
the blessedness of a cheerful heart and the
sweetness of a walk over the round earth.
This is a lesson the American has yet to
learn — capability of amusement on a low key.
He expects rapid and extraordinary returns.
He would make the very elemental laws pay
usury. He has nothing to invest in a walk ;
it is too slow, too cheap. We crave the as-
tonishing, the exciting, the far away, and do
not know the highways of the gods when we
see them, — always a sign of the decay of the
faith and simplicity of man.

EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 225

If I say to my neighbour, " Come with me,
I have great wonders to show you," he pricks
up his ears and comes forthwith ; but when I
take him on the hills under the full blaze of
the sun, or along the country road, our foot-
steps lighted by the moon and stars, and say
to him, " Behold, these are the wonders, these
are the circuits of the gods, this we now tread
is a morning star," he feels defrauded, and
as if I had played him a trick. And yet no-
thing less than dilatation and enthusiasm like
this is the badge of the master walker.

If we are not sad we are careworn, hurried,
discontented, mortgaging the present for the
promise of the future. If we take a walk, it
is as we take a prescription, with about the
same relish and with about the same purpose ;
and the more the fatigue the greater our
faith in the virtue of the medicine.

Of those gleesome saunters over the hills in
spring, or those sallies of the body in winter,
those excursions into space when the foot
strikes fire at every step, when the air tastes
like a new and finer mixture, when we ac-
cumulate force and gladness as we go along,
when the sight of objects by the roadside and
of the fields and woods pleases more than
pictures or than all the art in the world, —
those ten or twelve mile dashes that are but
the wit and affluence of the corporeal powers,

226 THE FOOTPATH WAY

— of such diversion and open road entertain-
ment, I say, most of us know very little.

I notice with astonishment that at our fashion-
able watering-places nobody walks ; that of all
those vast crowds of health-seekers and lovers
of country air, you can never catch one in the
fields or woods, or guilty of trudging along the
country road with dust on his shoes and sun-
tan on his hands and face. The sole amuse-
ment seems to be to eat and dress and sit
about the hotels and glare at each other. The
men look bored, the women look tired, and all
seem to sigh, " O Lord ! what shall we do to
be happy and not be vulgar } " Quite different
from our British cousins across the water, who
have plenty of amusement and hilarity, spend-
ing most of the time at their watering-places
in the open air, strolling, picnicking, boating,
climbing, briskly walking, apparently with
little fear of sun-tan or of compromising their
" gentility."

It is indeed astonishing with what ease and
hilarity the English walk. To an American it
seems a kind of infatuation. When Dickens
was in this country I imagine the aspirants to
the honour of a walk with him were not
numerous. In a pedestrian tour of England
by an American, I read that " after breakfast
with the Independent minister, he walked
with us for six miles out of town upon our

EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 227

road. Three little boys and girls, the youngest
six years old, also accompanied us. They were
romping and rambling about all the while, and
their morning walk must have been as much
as fifteen miles ; but they thought nothing of
it, and when we parted were apparently as
fresh as when they started, and very loath to
return."

I fear, also, the American is becoming dis-
qualified for the manly art of walking, by a
falling off in the size of his foot. He cherishes
and cultivates this part of his anatomy, and
apparently thinks his taste and good breeding
are to be inferred from its diminutive size. A
small, trim foot, well booted or gaitered, is the
national vanity. How we stare at the big feet
of foreigners, and wonder what may be the
price of leather in those countries, and where
all the aristocratic blood is, that these plebeian
extremities so predominate. If we were ad-
mitted to the confidences of the shoemaker to
Her Majesty or to His Royal Highness, no
doubt we would modify our views upon this
latter point, for a truly large and royal nature
is never stunted in the extremities ; a little
foot never yet supported a great character.

It is said that Englishmen when they first
come to this country are for some time under
the impression that American women all have
deformed feet, they are so coy of them and so

228 THE FOOTPATH WAY

studiously careful to keep them hid. That
there is an astonishing difference between the
women of the two countries in this respect,
every traveller can testify ; and that there is
a difference equally astonishing between the
pedestrian habits and capabilities of the rival
sisters is also certain.

The English pedestrian, no doubt, has the
advantage of us in the matter of climate ; for
notwithstanding the traditional gloom and
moroseness of English skies, they have in that
country none of those relaxing, sinking, ener-
vating days, of which we have so many here,
and which seem especially trying to the female
constitution — days which withdraw all support
from the back and loins, and render walking
of all things burdensome. Theirs is a climate
of which it has been said that " it invites men
abroad more days in the year and more hours
in the day than that of any other country."

Then their land is threaded with paths
which invite the walker, and which are
scarcely less important than the highways.
I heard of a surly nobleman near London who
took it into his head to close a footpath that
passed through his estate near his house, and
open another one a little farther off. The
pedestrians objected; the matter got into
the courts, and after protracted litigation
the aristocrat was beaten. The path could

EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 229

not be closed or moved. The memory of man
ran not to the time when there was not a foot-
path there, and every pedestrian should have
the right of way there still.

I remember the pleasure I had in the
path that connects Stratford-on-Avon with
Shottery, Shakespeare's path when he went
courting Anne Hathaway. By the king's high-
way the distance is somewhat farther, so there
is a well-worn path along the hedgerows and
through the meadows and turnip patches.
The traveller in it has the privilege of crossing
the railroad track, an unusual privilege in
England, and one denied to the lord in his
carriage, who must either go over or under it.
(It is a privilege, is it not, to be allowed the
forbidden, even if it be the privilege of being
run over by the engine ? ) In strolling over
the South Downs, too, I was delighted to find
that where the hill was steepest some benefactor
of the order of walkers had made notches in
the sward, so that the foot could bite the
better and firmer ; the path became a kind of
stairway, which I have no doubt the plough-
man respected.

When you see an English country church
withdrawn, secluded, out of the reach of
wheels, standing amid grassy graves and sur-
rounded by noble trees, approached by paths
and shaded lanes, you appreciate more than

230 THE FOOTPATH WAY

ever this beautiful habit of the people. Only
a race that knows how to use its feet, and
holds footpaths sacred, could put such a
charm of privacy and humility into such a
structure. I think I should be tempted to go
to church myself if I saw all my neighbours
starting off across the fields or along paths that
led to such charmed spots, and was sure I
would not be jostled or run over by the rival
chariots of the worshippers at the temple
doors. I think this is what ails our religion ;
humility and devoutness of heart leave one
when he lays by his walking shoes and walk-
ing clothes, and sets out for church drawn by
something.

Indeed, I think it would be tantamount to
an astonishing revival of religion if the people
would all walk to church on Sunday and walk
home again. Think how the stones would
preach to them by the wayside ; how their
benumbed minds would warm up beneath the
friction of the gravel ; how their vain and
foolish thoughts, their desponding thoughts,
their besetting demons of one kind and
another, would drop behind them, unable to
keep up or to endure the fresh air. They
would walk away from their ennui, their worldly
cares, their uncharitableness, their pride of
dress ; for these devils always want to ride,
while the simple virtues are never so happy as

EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 231

when on foot. Let us walk by all means ; but
if we will ride, get an ass.

Then the English claim that they are a
more hearty and robust people than we are.
It is certain they are a plainer people, have
plainer tastes, dress plainer, build plainer,
speak plainer, keep closer to facts, wear
broader shoes and coarser clothes, place a
lower estimate on themselves, etc. — all of
which traits favour pedestrian habits. The
English grandee is not confined to his carriage ;
but if the American aristocrat leaves his, he
is ruined. Oh, the weariness, the emptiness,
the plotting, the seeking rest and finding none,
that goes by in the carriages ! while your
pedestrian is always cheerful, alert, refreshed,
with his heart in his hand and his hand free to
all. He looks down upon nobody ; he is on
the common level. His pores are all open,
his circulation is active, his digestion good.
His heart is not cold, nor his faculties asleep.
He is the only real traveller ; he alone tastes
the " gay, fresh sentiment of the road." He
is not isolated, but one with things, with the
farms and industries on either hand. The vital,
universal currents play through him. He
knows the ground is alive ; he feels the pulses
of the wind, and reads the mute language
of things. His sympathies are all aroused ;
his senses are continually reporting messages

232 THE FOOTPATH WAY

to his mind. Wind^ frost, rain, heat, cold, are
something to him. He is not merely a spec-
tator of the panorama of nature, but a partici-
pator in it. He experiences the country he
passes through — tastes it, feels it, absorbs it ;
the traveller in his fine carriage sees it merely.
This gi\^s the fresh charm to that class of
books that may be called " Views Afoot," and
to the narratives of hunters, naturalists, ex-
ploring parties, etc. The walker does not
need a large territory. When you get into a
railway car you want a continent, the man in
his carriage requires a township ; but a walker
like Thoreau finds as much and more along the
shores of Walden Pond. The former, as it
were, has merely time to glance at the head-
ings of the chapters, while the latter need not
miss a line, and Thoreau reads between the
lines. Then the walker has the privilege of
the fields, the woods, the hills, the by-ways.
The apples by the roadside are for him, and
the berries, and the spring of water, and the
friendly shelter ; and if the weather is cold, he
eats the frost grapes and the persimmons, or
even the white meated turnip, snatched from
the field he passed through, with intredible
relish.

Afoot and in the open road, one has a fair
start in life at last. There is no hindrance
now. Let him put his best foot forward. He

EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 233

is on the broadest humane plane. This is on
the level of all the great laws and heroic deeds.
From this platform he is eligible to any good
fortune. He was sighing for the golden age ;
let him walk to it. Every step brings him
nearer. The youth of the world is but a few
days' journey distant. Indeed, I know persons
who think they have walked back to that fresh
aforetime of a single bright Sunday in autumn
or early spring. Before noon they felt its airs
upon their cheeks, and by nightfall, on the
banks of some quiet stream, or along some
path in the wood, or on some hill-top, aver they
have heard the voices and felt the wonder and
the mystery that so enchanted the early races
of men.

I think if I could walk through a country I
should not only see many things and have
adventures that I should otherwise miss, but
that I should come into relations with that
country at first hand, and with the men and
women in it, in a way that would afford the
deepest satisfaction. Hence I envy the good
fortune of all walkers, and feel like joining
myself to every tramp that comes along. I am
jealous of the clergyman I read about the other
day who footed it from Edinburgh to London,
as poor Effie Deans did, carrying her shoes in
her hand most of the way, and over the ground
that rugged Ben Jonson strode, larking it to

234 THE FOOTPATH WAY

Scotland^ so long ago. I read with longing
of the pedestrian feats of college youths, so
gay and light-hearted, with their coarse shoes
on their feet and their knapsacks on their
backs. It would have been a good draught of
the rugged cup to have walked with Wilson
the ornithologist, deserted by his companions,
from Niagara to Philadelphia through the
snows of winter. I almost wish that I had
been born to the career of a German mechanic,
that I might have had that delicious adven-
turous year of wandering over my country
before I settled down to work. I think how
much richer and firmer-grained life would be
to me if I could journey afoot through Florida
and Texas, or follow the windings of the Platte
or the Yellowstone, or stroll through Oregon,
or browse for a season about Canada. In the
bright inspiring days of autumn I only want
the time and the companion to walk back to
the natal spot, the family nest, across two
States and into the mountains of a third.
What adventures we would have by the way,
what hard pulls, what prospects from hills, what
spectacles we would behold of night and day,
what passages with dogs, what glances, what
peeps into windows, what characters we should
fall in with, and how seasoned and hardy we
should arrive at our destination !

For companion I should want a veteran of

I

EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 235

the war ! Those marches put something into
him I like. Even at this distance his mettle
is but little softened. As soon as he gets
warmed up it all comes back to him. He
catches your step and away you go, a gay,
adventurous, half predatory couple. How
quickly he falls into the old ways of jest and
anecdote and song ! You may have known
him for years without having heard him hum
an air, or more than casually revert to the
subject of his experience during the war. You
have even questioned and cross-questioned him
without firing the train you wished. But get
him out on a vacation tramp, and you can walk
it all out of him. By the camp-fire at night
or swinging along the streams by day, song,
anecdote, adventure, come to the surface, and
you wonder how your companion has kept silent
so long.

It is another proof of how walking brings
out the true character of a man. The devil
never yet asked his victims to take a walk
with him. You will not be long in finding
your companion out. All disguises will fall
away from him. As his pores open his
character is laid bare. His deepest and most
private self will come to the top. It matters
little whom you ride with, so he be not a pick-
pocket ; for both of you will, very likely, settle
down closer and firmer in your reserve, shaken

236 THE FOOTPATH WAY

down like a measure of corn by the jolting as
the journey proceeds. But walking is a more
vital copartnership ; the relation is a closer
and more sympathetic one, and you do not feel
like walking ten paces with a stranger without
speaking to him.

Hence the fastidiousness of the professional
walker in choosing or admitting a companion,
and hence the truth of a remark of Emerson
that you will generally fare better to take your
dog than to invite your neighbour. Your cur-
dog is a true pedestrian, and your neighbour
is very likely a small politician. The dog
enters thoroughly into the spirit of the enter-
prise ; he is not indifferent or preoccupied ; he
is constantly sniffing adventure, laps at every
spring, looks upon every field and wood as a
new world to be explored, is ever on some
fresh trail, knows something important will
happen a little farther on, gazes with the true
wonder-seeing eyes, whatever the spot or
whatever the road finds it good to be there —
in short, is just that happy, delicious, excursive
vagabond that touches one at so many points,
and whose human prototype in a companion
robs miles and leagues of half their power to
fatigue.

Persons who find themselves spent in a short
walk to the market or the post-office, or to do
a little shopping, wonder how it is that their

EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 237

pedestrian friends can compass so many weary
miles and not fall down from sheer exhaustion ;
ignorant of the fact that the walker is a kind
of projectile that drops far or near according
to the expansive force of the motive that set it
in motion, and that it is easy enough to regu-
late the charge according to the distance to be
traversed. If I am loaded to carry only one
mile and am compelled to walk three, I
generally feel more fatigue than if I had
walked six under the proper impetus of pre-
adjusted resolution. In other words, the will
or corporeal mainspring, whatever it be, is cap-
able of being wound up to different degrees of
tension, so that one may walk all day nearly
as easy as half that time if he is prepared
beforehand. He knows his task, and he
measures and distributes his powers ac-
cordingly. It is for this reason that an un-
known road is always a long road. We cannot
cast the mental eye along it and see the end
from the beginning. We are fighting in the
dark, and cannot take the measure of our foe.
Every step must be preordained and provided
for in the mind. Hence also the fact that to
vanquish one mile in the woods seems equal to
compassing three in the open country. The
furlongs are ambushed, and we magnify them.
Then, again, how annoying to be told it is
only five miles to the next place when it is

238

THE FOOTPATH WAY

really eight or ten ! We fall short nearly half
the distance, and are compelled to urge and
roll the spent ball the rest of the way.

In such a case walking degenerates from a
fine art to a mechanic art ; we walk merely ;
to get over the ground becomes the one
serious and engrossing thought ; whereas
success in walking is not to, let your right foot
know what your left foot doeth. Your heart
must furnish such music that in keeping time
to it your feet will carry you around the globe
without knowing it. The walker I would de-
scribe takes no note of distance ; his walk is a
sally, a hon mot, an unspoken jeu d' esprit ; the
ground is his butt, his provocation ; it furnishes
him the resistance his body craves ; he re-
bounds upon it, he glances off and returns
again, and uses it gaily as his tool.

I do not think I exaggerate the importance
or the charms of pedestrianism, or our need as
a people to cultivate the art. I think it would
tend to soften the national manners, to teach
us the meaning of leisure, to acquaint us with
the charms of the open air, to strengthen and
foster the tie between the race and the land.
No one else looks out upon the world so kindly
and charitably as the pedestrian ; no one else
gives and takes so much from the country he
passes through. Next to the labourer in the
fields, the walker holds the closest relation to

EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 239

fthe soil ; and he holds a closer and more vital
relation to Nature because he is freer and his
mind more at leisure.

Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is
no more than a potted plant in his house or
I carriage till he has established communication
'^ with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch
of his soles to it. Then the tie of association
is born ; then spring those invisible fibres and
rootlets through which character comes to
smack of the soil, and which make a man
kindred to the spot of earth he inhabits.

The roads and paths you have walked along
in summer and winter weather, the fields and
hills which you have looked upon in lightness
and gladness of heart, where fresh thoughts
have come into your mind, or some noble pros-
pect has opened before you, and especially
the quiet ways where you have walked in sweet
converse with your friend, pausing under the
trees, drinking at the spring — henceforth they
are not the same ; a new charm is added ;
those thoughts spring there perennial, your
friend walks there for ever.

We have produced some good walkers and
saunterers, and some noted climbers ; but as a
staple recreation, as a daily practice, the mass
of the people dislike and despise walking.
Thoreau said he was a good horse, but a poor
roadster. I chant the virtues of the roadster

240 THE FOOTPATH WAY

as well. I sing of the sweetness of gravel,
good sharp quartz-grit. It is the proper con-'
diment for the sterner seasons, and many a
human gizzard would be cured of half its ills
by a suitable daily allowance of it. I think
Thoreau himself would have profited immensely
by it. His diet was too exclusively vegetable.
A man cannot live on grass alone. If one has
been a lotus-eater all summer, he must turn
gravel-eater in the fall and winter. Those
who have tried it know that gravel possesses an
equal though an opposite charm. It spurs to
action. The foot tastes it and henceforth rests
not. The joy of moving and surmounting, of
attrition and progression, the thirst for space,
for miles and leagues of distance, for sights and
prospects, to cross mountains and thread rivers,
and defy frost, heat, snow, danger, difficulties,
seizes it ; and from that day forth its possessor
is enrolled in the noble army of walkers.

John Burroughs.

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